I have a 1TB Western Digital MyPassport USB3.0 external hdd. I had two equal sized partitions in it.
Partition 1 was NTFS
Partition 2 was NTFS later changed to Bitlocker
Everything was working fine.
Yesterday I connected it to my Windows 7 laptop as always and was browsing the files. When I tried to open a folder in Partition 1, windows explorer got stuck and went into 'Not responding' state. I waited for some time and then disconnected the HDD from USB port.
From that point on, Windows no longer recognize the Disk when I connect it to USB. The Drive spins up and the LED blinks but the partitions do not appear in Windows explorer. However 'Western digital mypassport' is listed in 'Safely remove hardware' context menu. When I clcik that option, I get the normal 'It is safe to remove the hardware' message as well.
I tried to connect it to other PCs(running Windows 7 and 8) and still it doesn't work.
So far I have done the following checks/diagnostics:
I went into the 'Storage management' tool. The HDD is listed there with the correct size. But it says '931 GB Unallocated'. It also says 'You need to initialize the Disk before you could use it'
As far as I know only new harddisks need to be initialised. Is it possible that Windows deleted my partitions?
I tried a number of data recovery softwares such as EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard, Disk Internals EFS Recovery, Disk Internals NTFS Recovery, Get Data Back... But none of these tools were able to detect the lost partitions.
After these, I ran the Western Digital Diagnotics utility. When I ran the SMART test, it passed without any errors. However the 'Quick Test' failed - although it did not say what the error was exactly. The 'Adavcned scan' got stuck at some point and I had to abort it.
What do you think happened? The HDD is still under warranty and I could get a replacement. But the most important thing is the data. Is there any way I could get the data back? - or atleast part of it?
What are my options?
Thanks in advance
EDIT: EASEUS allows me to take an image of the entire disk. Is it any good. Is there someway I can make use of this image?
Also one of my frineds forwarded me to this forum post:
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=9af409790dcb3447dddf4fb641a6a4ff&topic=1367.0
That user manged to fix the problem by modifying the header manually. IS it applicable in my case?
Partition 1 was NTFS
Partition 2 was NTFS later changed to Bitlocker
Everything was working fine.
Yesterday I connected it to my Windows 7 laptop as always and was browsing the files. When I tried to open a folder in Partition 1, windows explorer got stuck and went into 'Not responding' state. I waited for some time and then disconnected the HDD from USB port.
From that point on, Windows no longer recognize the Disk when I connect it to USB. The Drive spins up and the LED blinks but the partitions do not appear in Windows explorer. However 'Western digital mypassport' is listed in 'Safely remove hardware' context menu. When I clcik that option, I get the normal 'It is safe to remove the hardware' message as well.
I tried to connect it to other PCs(running Windows 7 and 8) and still it doesn't work.
So far I have done the following checks/diagnostics:
I went into the 'Storage management' tool. The HDD is listed there with the correct size. But it says '931 GB Unallocated'. It also says 'You need to initialize the Disk before you could use it'
As far as I know only new harddisks need to be initialised. Is it possible that Windows deleted my partitions?
I tried a number of data recovery softwares such as EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard, Disk Internals EFS Recovery, Disk Internals NTFS Recovery, Get Data Back... But none of these tools were able to detect the lost partitions.
After these, I ran the Western Digital Diagnotics utility. When I ran the SMART test, it passed without any errors. However the 'Quick Test' failed - although it did not say what the error was exactly. The 'Adavcned scan' got stuck at some point and I had to abort it.
What do you think happened? The HDD is still under warranty and I could get a replacement. But the most important thing is the data. Is there any way I could get the data back? - or atleast part of it?
What are my options?
Thanks in advance
EDIT: EASEUS allows me to take an image of the entire disk. Is it any good. Is there someway I can make use of this image?
Also one of my frineds forwarded me to this forum post:
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=9af409790dcb3447dddf4fb641a6a4ff&topic=1367.0
That user manged to fix the problem by modifying the header manually. IS it applicable in my case?
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