External Disk Drive Western Digital on Data Recovery

Artem Makarov aka Robin
28.06.2008
6037 views

I have to recover data from the USB external disk drive. A notebook hard drive Western Digital 2,5" is in the case connected to the system unit by means of USB interface. It has just stopped working. I have to recover data and repair a hard drive as it has vol.160 GB and is far from being cheap. Out of my practice I know that sometimes an external drive state of nonoperability and refusal to be defined in the system or incorrect definition and soon and so forth, can be caused by damage of the USB case or malfunction of a connecting cable. I always take a storage disc out of the box also diagnose a disc separately. If the disc works correctly and there is no problem with data access, the client pays for diagnostics and is recommended to buy a new case. In such cases a data recovery is not paid.

The external box is made thoroughly. It has a stylish design with rounded corners, a trademark "WD" on the top cover, and the disk is reliably insulated with foil.

Disassembled USB case

Disassembled USB case

During diagnostics, it was found out, that the disk had some bad sectors which interfered with the device and operational system correct work. The disk contained a FAT32 file system which was a rather strange choice for a disk of great volume. Taking into account very wide distribution of NT systems (Windows XP, Vista, etc.) which perfectly support NTFS we admit that it is radically incorrect to use FAT 32 on drive discs of great volume. I hope, there are no old computers with Win 98 and ME among those you are dealing with.

Very often my customers say, - "Why is a disk more expensive, than the data recovery? Is it possible to repair a disk so that I could download the data all by myself?" Every time I have to answer the question using a mere example: in this case a disk repair is in initialization and start of a factory self-testing cycle on the store, a so-called self scan. During the self scan the disk turns out as a new, clean SMART, with re-counted adaptive, anew generated tables of defects and untouched user area.

A self-scan process is fully automated; usually it takes over round-the-clock, at full operator non-participation. A disk is processed having a separate power on, the necessary scripts are loaded, and records of all steps are made automatically. At the end it is necessary to reconnect power and make some additions to the service area, and the disk is completely ready to work in the user mode.

But self test is pernicious for the data. So when making a complex work on disk repair and data recovery, at first data are recovered, and then a disc is repaired. Only this way, and no other way.

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