Dropped WD external HDD, can access half the files

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almostflawed

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Sep 19, 2017
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So last night while trying to show my friends music I had been working on, I carried my external HDD from my girlfriends laptop to my pc and dropped it from a 2 ft to tile floor. Luckily it STILL WORKS! HAZZAH! unluckily, only half the files show up. Most that are still there open fine, some time out, but i have hundreds of thousands of files anyway. So the other half of data i cant reach is of course the more important by far. There must be a way to get those files agaim without taking it somewhere as this seems to be a unique scenario for dropped drives.
 
Solution
USAFRet
A dropped external drive that is acting up is NOT a unique condition. It indicates a physical fail of the drive.

Step 1. Copy what you can, before it fails completely. Do this only once.
Step 2. Do a sector by sector copy of the entire drive, off to a different drive.
Step 3. Do any forensics on this copy.

Do NOT screw with this drive any more than you absolutely have to.
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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A dropped external drive that is acting up is NOT a unique condition. It indicates a physical fail of the drive.

Step 1. Copy what you can, before it fails completely. Do this only once.
Step 2. Do a sector by sector copy of the entire drive, off to a different drive.
Step 3. Do any forensics on this copy.

Do NOT screw with this drive any more than you absolutely have to.
 
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Solution
USAFRet

USAFRet

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The 'missing files' should be recovered from your backup. Oh wait....
That is where I would get my files from a dead drive from.

The sector by sector copy to a different drive, if it works and does not die in the middle of the process, would maybe allow recovery of some/most of them.

Of course, the very act of doing that sector by sector copy may kill it completely.
As might any other recovery process.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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I don't have a specific 'guide', but Macrium Reflect will do this.
See here:
http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Cloning+a+disk

At step 7, select "Perform a forensic Sector copy"
----------
Forensic Sector Copy

Copy every sector from the source to the target disk partition.
Please note tat this option is only necessary if you want to copy unused file system space and will significantly increase the time to complete the clone.
----------

Of course, this requires a whole other drive to copy to.
It might work. Also, it might fail completely when it gets to the damaged portion of the disk.

Then attempt to retrieve some files from this new copy.
 
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

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Sep 17, 2016
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I've had drives fail where one entire side of a platter suddenly became inaccessible, likely because that head died or got misaligned by impact. Usually the symptom is the drive will not format past a certain %, and when you look up how many platters it has, it turns out to be right on a platter boundary. I've formatted such drives before by creating partitions before and after the bad area and continued to use them for up to 10 years afterwards. However if the damage is caused by one head crashing into platter, it will scrape off all of the media particles which will soon bounce around with continued use and destroy the rest of the drive. So get what data you can off right away!

As for the rest of the data, if it's a mechanical issue there's no software in the world that can recover it, so this is likely how the recovery company will get it back. It's quite interesting and worth a watch!
 
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R

RolandJS

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Mar 10, 2017
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If the data is very important, getting that HD to a data recovery company/specialist is a must, yesterday if not today. Quite often, the more DIYs are applied by a computer technician and/or end-user, with the best of intentions, the more billable time and effort by a DR entity and the less are the chances for meaningful recovery. Check with Dr_Luke, make sure I'm correct in this situation.
 
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