Western Digital External Drive Recovery
I’ve recently had a bit of a Hard Drive failure scare, and after a few weeks and several astronomical quotes from data recovery services, the drive strangely restored itself to full health.
When I was initially googling for answers, the only post I could find describing the same problem as the one I had was in German and not very helpful. So for the sake of giving a few more google results to the future victims of the same predicament, I thought I’d document my experience here. Hopefully it might reassure a few people.
The drive is a Western Digital"My Passport" model no. WDBACX0010BSL - 00. 1TB drive. I had it in HFS+ (Mac OS Journaled) format running on Mac OSX 10.8.4.
About 2 weeks ago I started getting the error “This disk you inserted was not readable by this computer”. Disk utility showed it as “SYMWAVE WDC WD10TMVW-11Z Media”, with capacity of 0, which I had never seen before (it normally says “WD My Passport 0730 Media). WD Firmware update couldn’t find it, and Diskwarrior couldn’t find it. I tried all the typical solutions (changing cables, hubs, computers) to no avail. The light on the side of the enclosure wasn’t coming on. The disk was vibrating as if spinning normally, and it wasn’t doing the nasty clicking sound of death.
The best quote for data recovery was $800 with no guarantee, which I just don’t have. So it’s pretty much been just sitting there for about three weeks, aside from a few times that I have plugged it in, just in case it had fixed itself.
So this morning I have a moment of optimism and plug it in, and the drive lights up and says "hey, how’s it going? What do you mean about a failure? I’ve been working this whole time, I don’t know what you’re even talking about”. Actually that’s just what I said in a funny voice when it started working perfectly as if nothing had ever happened.
Despite it’s current blasé attitude towards its newfound functionality, I’m obviously frantically getting every bit of data off it and onto a more reliable drive as I type this. But if google has brought you and I together through our common problem keywords, then I urge you to just let the drive sit there for a few weeks before you go spending mountains of cash on data recovery. It may just fix itself.
I’ll probably stick to Seagate from now on I think. So glad I didn’t pay for data recovery.