Hi everyone,
I'm having an issue with a WD My Book 3.0.
I was using it to back up data from another failing 1TB internal hard drive (I got 2 HD failures in less than 12 hours, lucky day I guess) with Cobian Backup 11. I left it to back up overnight and in the morning I found it didn't finish because it was copying very slowly. I tried closing Cobian and restarting Windows, but it just froze and I had to brutally reboot.
Turns out my drive had bad sectors. Yay.
Now, I managed to flawlessly recover the data from the 1TB drive using SystemRescueCD and ddrescue, it was quite fast and I was really impressed, so I tried it with the 3TB drive.
And it was SO slow. Speed ranged from 32kb/s to a whopping 256kb/s. With an average speed of 180 kb/s, it would take ddrescue AGES to recover the whole thing. Nonetheless, there were NO sign of errors in the hour or so that I let ddrescue run.
I ran ddrescue with the -n option to skip bad sectors during the first pass; this and the 0 errors count made me think there was something more to it.
So I tried googling some more, and I found some very interesting posts in this forum, written by fzabkar, about using DMDE. I thought I'd give it a shot, and I was surprised I was actually able to see my directories and files again.
Unfortunately, the drive is still very slow, and doesn't allow me to recover anything because a read error keeps popping. Now, I THINK (never used DMDE so I'm probably wrong) that the boot sector/MFT is on a badly damaged sector, and it cannot recover anything because of that.
I was able to locate the backup boot sector at the end of the drive, but I don't really know what to do with it.
So I thought it was time to ask the experts: how can I recover the data from this drive? Is DMDE the right way? I didn't try any "hard drive magic fixer" tool because I don't want to make it worse...
I'm having an issue with a WD My Book 3.0.
I was using it to back up data from another failing 1TB internal hard drive (I got 2 HD failures in less than 12 hours, lucky day I guess) with Cobian Backup 11. I left it to back up overnight and in the morning I found it didn't finish because it was copying very slowly. I tried closing Cobian and restarting Windows, but it just froze and I had to brutally reboot.
Turns out my drive had bad sectors. Yay.
Now, I managed to flawlessly recover the data from the 1TB drive using SystemRescueCD and ddrescue, it was quite fast and I was really impressed, so I tried it with the 3TB drive.
And it was SO slow. Speed ranged from 32kb/s to a whopping 256kb/s. With an average speed of 180 kb/s, it would take ddrescue AGES to recover the whole thing. Nonetheless, there were NO sign of errors in the hour or so that I let ddrescue run.
I ran ddrescue with the -n option to skip bad sectors during the first pass; this and the 0 errors count made me think there was something more to it.
So I tried googling some more, and I found some very interesting posts in this forum, written by fzabkar, about using DMDE. I thought I'd give it a shot, and I was surprised I was actually able to see my directories and files again.
Unfortunately, the drive is still very slow, and doesn't allow me to recover anything because a read error keeps popping. Now, I THINK (never used DMDE so I'm probably wrong) that the boot sector/MFT is on a badly damaged sector, and it cannot recover anything because of that.
I was able to locate the backup boot sector at the end of the drive, but I don't really know what to do with it.
So I thought it was time to ask the experts: how can I recover the data from this drive? Is DMDE the right way? I didn't try any "hard drive magic fixer" tool because I don't want to make it worse...