creative Posted February 6, 2011 Share Posted February 6, 2011 Morning gents. I have been asked to try and get access to an external WD elements 1TB drive that doesnt seem to be recognised anymore. It does click occasionally so I'm guessing bad sectors/drive dieing. The drive itself is recognised in devices and it also found by disc management but I am unable to initialize it so W7 wont see it as a drive I can enter. I have tried WD own diagnostic software and that failed. I have tried a few recovery programs that I have had very good results with and they also cant find any partitions etc on the drive. Tried to get access with a live boot linux and again no luck there, but that might be down to my noobish linux skills! I am guessing that the bad sectors contain the drive information hence not being able to gain access so I was thinking maybe format the drive and then try a recovery to get the data back off. Loading up partition magic to see if I can format this way but its taking an age to load up as its scanning the drive (led blinking) and hasn't actually opened yet. I am happy to let this sit and do its thing until its scanned the whole drive. Is there any other way to get this drive to be recognised and access. There must be a way as devices see it and programs can see it... just not access it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrRalphMan Posted February 6, 2011 Share Posted February 6, 2011 When the other devices see the drive, do they just see it as audb drive or do they recognise the capacity? Sounds like the drive is fubar'd, but you could try the freeze it over night method. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
creative Posted February 6, 2011 Author Share Posted February 6, 2011 they recognise its model number etc etc and its capacity, just not how its formatted and how much space is used etc. This is what the WD drive test comes up with on a long test: Test Option: EXTENDED TEST Model Number: WD 10EADS External Unit Serial Number: WCAV55849811 Firmware Number: 1.75 Capacity: 1000.20 GB SMART Status: PASS Test Result: FAIL Test Error Code: 08-Too many bad sectors detected. Test Time: 16:11:04, February 06, 2011 Windows disk management recognises the drive but wont allow it to be inialized due to, Im guessing, the drive details being located on these bad sectors. so my question is, how do I get the drive to be recognised? I'm running it through my file recovery program on a more advanced setting to see if I can get anything off it. I cant even get it to format as windows doesnt allow that in the devices section and Partition magic ran for 2 days without opening due to the size of the drive! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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