WD Elements Drive Failed - Can't find any data

Hi Lutfij

Thanks for your response.

1. I haven't checked in the BIOS yet. The drive does not have an OS - just files/documents. It sounds kind of like it's whirring so my best guess at "does it spin up" is yes.

2. It's no longer under warranty. It's probably 5 years old at a guess. I've never had any problems with it before though so no signs that it was on it's way out. This has come out of the blue. I could open up the enclosure but have been holding off of doing this for a couple of reasons - first, all my machines are laptops so it's tricky to connect the bare drive to anything! And secondly I had read somewhere that it was important to try to get the drive running using the original data socket if possible - but I'm not sure why. So i guess I haven't opened it up mainly due to lack of knowledge. I can potentially use a friends desktop tower to try and get the internal drive going.

3. That may be the case. Although it's tough that there was no warning when this drive failed and I wasn't in the middle of copying data etc. So to damage the drive this badly from the laptop shutting down seems like really bad luck. With testdisk I left it running for a couple of days - it kept complaining about bad sectors and the ETA didn't seem to be moving at all so I don't even really know if I went the right route to be honest.

I have/am considering a data recovery shop. There are a couple of issues here though - first, I have heard that it can be extortionately expensive. Secondly, there are a number of highly confidential documents on the drive from clients which I could get in a lot of trouble over if they were to be seen by a third-party. This just makes it a bit more complicated to get other people involved.

Ironically although it's a 2TB drive there is only about 500GB of data there and probably less than 1GB or 2GB is important. I just wish that i could get some sort of recovery to get me a few of the files - and obviously hope that they are the right ones! I've seen other people stressing about the file structure and trying to get the drive working. I don't mind ditching the drive and i don't mind if the file structure is lost. I just really need a few of these files back if possible. Am still hoping there may be some solution that can read the raw data....

Any more help appreciated.

Thanks again

~S~

I'm going to try testDisk again.. see if can get anywhere.

1. First off all I notice there is a "Create MBR" option at the beginning... I'm assuming that I should NOT use this?

2. I try to recover partitions and it notes a lot of Read Errors. Finally i get to the end of the scan with no partitions found, but the screen below. Should I attempt to 'add partition'? Or should i just continue to the deeper scan (which i have run before with no success)?

I'm still running a Deep Scan with TestDisk. However, it looks like it's getting a read error at every step of the way. This has been running 2 days now..... Can anyone advise whether it is worth leaving it going or whether I should stop it?