WD My Book recovery

[cquam]

I have a 500gb My book from Western Digital that I used for storing photo's
When I try to acces that drive letter it gives a message that the drive is not formated. I've downloaded the Recover my files program and it has been running for four and a half hours and has only found 12 files. from reading the forum it appears as though it should run faster than that. I'm running XP pro and 2gb ram

[GDH]

Yes, this sounds a bit odd. It sounds like your drive is not being read properly.

Please check the standard things - can you hear the drive spinning? Is the drive light flashing? Is it making any strange noises or running excessively hot? Is there any chance that the USB connection has fallen asleep?

Once you have checked out the above, I think you should start a new search.

It would be best to power down the USB drive and reconnect it and start from the beginning.

This time, use Recover My Files to run a "Complete Format Recover". Search the "physical" drive, and search only for the default selected file types.

Watch the progress window, and when Recover My Files locates the missing Master File Table, you should see the "OS Items Found =xxxx" number rapidly increase (each one represents a file). When the OS Items reaches a large number and is stable, then you can press the stop button and let the search results build and display in Folder View of the results screen. You should then be able to click on the files found and preview their content. To get to this point should take less than 2 hours.

Please let us know how it goes.

Thank you.

[IndoMvert]

Hello, I'm a new user.

I have the same problem with my 500gb MyBook. GDH - Does searching the 'physical' drive mean going into the options and selecting the physical drive option under the advanced tab, or should I just use the default settings?

[GDH]

Hi,

No, just run with the default settings.

When you first start Recover My Files you will see a wizard window with 4 search options.

In your case, start with the Fast Format Recover (and if it does not work you can come back and try the Complete Format Recover). Click NEXT.

When you get to the Drive Selection Window, you should see your problem drive listed as a "physical" drive. A physical drive just means the whole hard drive (as apposed to a "logical" drive which is represented by a drive letter).

Your booting drive letter is usually located on "0physical", so your problem secondary drive should be "1physical" (or a number greater than 1).

I hope this helps.

[Team6]

So when you have a large number of system files, what are you supposed to do with the drive at that point? How're you supposed to get the system to reinitialize the drive? I'm working with a 1tb WD Mybook, and to do the full scan of 1tb is going to take forever and a day.

[GDH]

Recover My Files is not a drive repair tool. It does not 'fix' a problem drive.

When you run a 'drive repair' tool, there is always the risk that you will make things even worse, as you are toying with the original data.

Recover My Files is data recovery software, meaning that it will locate the missing data and allow you to save it to another drive.

Data Recovery software is designed so that it will not make the data loss problem any worse.

[Team6]

Okay, so the notebook stopped at 409 OS files, had been in the same spot for the last hour or so. So I stopped the search, and I see a folder with a red x, full of .tmp files. Other than that I am unable to find the mass amount of music that should be on the drive. My land lady just turned ALL Her Vinyl/CD's into MP3's and had it stored on this drive, and it only found about 27 mp3's, all of them WD proprietary clicks and sounds or whatnot. No actual MP3's. I need to recover this data for her. Do you have a utility to "recover" the data stuck in the .tmp files?

[GDH]

Did the OS items numbers top going up? or did the actual search stop?

I suggest you try running the same search again. This time, first go to OPTIONS > ADVANCED and click on prompt for start cluster.

Add MP3 files to the list of files to search and make sure you search the physical drive.

When you start the search, enter a starting position a bit further down the drive. The idea being that if it is a bad sector at the start that this holding it up, we are trying to skip past it.

Thank you.

[Team6]

The OS numbers stopped going up, however I restarted it again and have been letting it run for about 7 hours now, and it's gone from 407 to 413, so it's still finding things it would appear. I stopped it, but I assume simply because of the drives size I'm going to need to let it run longer to find the items. I'm guessing that it's finding the initial data on the hard drive, and I need to let it go through and find more items. Should I stop the search in progress and attempt your suggestion?

[GDH]

Yes, stop the search and try again - it sounds like it is stuck.

You should need less than 2 hours to find the Master File Table (MFT) and the OS items number should go up very fast to over 50,000 files.