Data recovery help. western digital my passport 1tb

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sagooding

sagooding

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Jan 19, 2009
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I bought a western digital 4tb external hard drive and was planning on transferring all of my office's files TO it FROM a my passport 1tb western digital portable hard drive. so the 4tb is new and blank and the 1tb has all my office files on it

First i plugged in the blank 4tb external hard drive and then it installed the drivers and everything was working fine.
Then i plugged in the 1tb portable hard drive with all my data and i only saw one of the two partitions come up. Also when i tried to view files on partition that came up the windows just freezes and then the partition diappears and I unplug and replug it to see the same result repeat.

I plugged the portable hard drive into other computers without the 4tb one plugged in at the same time and still the same thing happens.

I have extremely important data on it for my office and i don't know what to do.
How could a partition just disappear and why cant i view the files in the partition that is showing up.

Also there is no hardware damage.the 1tb hard drive doesnt make any clicking sounds or anything.

Please can someone help me ?!??!!
 
Solution
N
First, you should try and plug it into a different pc. If you get it working, take the info off it immediately. From there, all you can try is to remove the hard drive from the case, and install it internally in the pc. That takes all the usb and controller crap out of the loop. Good luck, hopefully you recover your files.

Second, never ever use an external hard drive, flash drive, RW CD/DVD, tablet, laptop etc. as the only storage for important files. Treat these devices as a backup only. If you have data this important, this sort of think is not an acceptable means of storing these file. To make it worse, they are easily dropped, lost, or stolen. Don't ever treat these as reliable storage. They are not reliable.

Good luck...
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njxc500

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First, you should try and plug it into a different pc. If you get it working, take the info off it immediately. From there, all you can try is to remove the hard drive from the case, and install it internally in the pc. That takes all the usb and controller crap out of the loop. Good luck, hopefully you recover your files.

Second, never ever use an external hard drive, flash drive, RW CD/DVD, tablet, laptop etc. as the only storage for important files. Treat these devices as a backup only. If you have data this important, this sort of think is not an acceptable means of storing these file. To make it worse, they are easily dropped, lost, or stolen. Don't ever treat these as reliable storage. They are not reliable.

Good luck getting your files back, but change your backup methods.
 
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sagooding

sagooding

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Thank you i will try my best to fix it. and i will learn from this.thank you so much for your answer it really helped.
 
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mbreslin1954

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Nov 27, 2010
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Yes, many of us have learned the hard way: External HDDs are for backup only, not for the only source of your data. Any hard drive will fail when you least expect it, and in fact they WILL all fail. So the rule is to always have your data on two devices at the same time: One your primary storage, the other a backup device. The chance of both failing at the same time are infinitesimal, so you're covered.

So remember, every hard drive ever made will, at some point, fail, and if it's the only source of your data, you're screwed.

njxc500's advice is good, if you just cannot get at your data in the enclosure, take it out of the enclosure and mount it or attach it to your desktop PC, and try accessing it directly.
 
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tinabrownsye

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Feb 22, 2014
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Does the WD passport detected by computer as a drive letter like E:? If not, you may try to go to device manager and see whether it is detected by computer. Try to assign a drive letter to the drive
http://goo.gl/r8Hf4D

You may then scan the hard drive with some anti virus software to make sure that it is clean
http://goo.gl/7Aki3T

After that, you can recover data from wd passport with data recovery tool
http://goo.gl/AOeQ3R
 
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