Help me recover my friend's goat porn

Gruffalo Soldier

So, a work friend came to me with a problem - he kicked his external hard drive (a 2tb Western Digital 'MyBook') while watching a film, and it appears to have become corrupted. Apparently I am the go-to guy for this sort of thing, despite having never tried to remedy such a situation before, so he brought it to me to take a look at.

When plugged into a USB port, Windows 7 goes through the usual 'installing new device' gumpf, and reports that the device is ready to use, and the drive shows up in 'Device Manager', with no apparent errors. It does not however show up in My Computer, or 'Disk Management'. When plugged into Ubuntu, it does not mount onto the desktop, and when I look at it in 'Disk Utility' it appears as the correct size, but does not show any partitions. This leads me to believe that the kick has corrupted the partition table for the drive, but that the data is possibly still available, just with no frame of reference for the computer to find it.

I am currently about 1% through a scan of the disk using testdisk on Ubuntu; so far every single cylinder has come back as 'read error'. Having never done this before, I do not know if this is normal - at the end of the scan will it offer a solution, or will it just say 'your disk is fucked, what the hell did you think I meant by 'read error' these past 2097151 cylinders, retard?'?

When you plug it in, the drive sounds like it is trying to spin up, then failing, then trying again, ad infinitum, but I don't know whether this is symtomatic of a hardware failure, or whether it is jsut a result of the computer not being able to find any partition table from which to reference data, so it gives up and tries looking somewhere else.

Anyway, I have the hard drive for the weekend. It could contain a few movies and some innocuous photos from my friend's past, it could contain bovine erotica and stolen CIA documents detailing how JFK was really killed by aliens, it could contain both. In any case, can anybody offer any advice as to what to do next?

Any help or advice will be much appreciated!

matt has a problem

It's gone. There's a good chance the head impacted the platter when he kicked it, damaging the head to the point it won't read any more. If you could find the exact model number drive, and are feeling extremely adventurous and willing to lose however much money the new drive costs, you could do a platter pull, and put the platters from the old drive into the new one. But there's no guarantee at all that would work, and you'd need to know how to successfully disassemble and reassemble a drive in a clean environment.

TychoCelchuuu

If it's really good goat porn, he can always bring it to a data recovery service, which will have a pretty good chance of getting most or all of his stuff, but that's super expensive, of course.

Gruffalo Soldier

Thanks for the advice guys; I figured it was probably a lost cause but thought it was worth a shot. I will price up some data recovery companies and put him on to them.

Incidentally, running Testdisk for approximately 24 hours straight resulted in a 1.2GB .log file that when opened caused Ubuntu to shit itself so hard that the graphics drivers spontaneously deleted themselves. The log file contained no useful information. Good times.

iRevert

I can upload a very simple data recovery tool I use but I can't promise it will work.

Its about as basic as they come in terms of features, but its small/quick/and works and so thats why I keep it around. Let me know if you want me to upload it for you.

Gihgehls

Spinrite is magic!

Gruffalo Soldier

iRevert wrote:

I can upload a very simple data recovery tool I use but I can't promise it will work.

Its about as basic as they come in terms of features, but its small/quick/and works and so thats why I keep it around. Let me know if you want me to upload it for you.

I'll give it a go, if it's no trouble for you. I've tried a one free data recovery program I found, but it didn't even detect the drive was connected.

Gihgehls wrote:

Spinrite is magic!

If you think it will work I will look into getting a copy - as I said this is for a friend so if they are willing to shell out the cash I'm willing to play with the software!

iRevert

Sending you a PM now with the upload.

Gruffalo Soldier

iRevert wrote:

Sending you a PM now with the upload.

Many many thanks for that! Alas it does not detect the drive either.

I am going to take it to work and hook it up direct to a desktop rather than through the USB, but I don't hold out much hope. It does sound like something mechanical has gone wrong with it. I contacted a data recovery company and they quoted £75 to have a look, and "from £495" to actually do any data retrieval. Somehow I don't think even the best goat porn could justify the expense.

Thanks again to all who have offered advice!

spool32

Gruffalo Soldier wrote:

When you plug it in, the drive sounds like it is trying to spin up, then failing, then trying again, ad infinitum, but I don't know whether this is symtomatic of a hardware failure, or whether it is jsut a result of the computer not being able to find any partition table from which to reference data, so it gives up and tries looking somewhere else.

This is definitely, definitely the sound of a mechanical hardware failure. The data is still on the platters, but your friend damaged the mechanics that move the read arm. IF IF IF he has more than $1000 worth of data on that drive, he could consider sending it to a data recovery shop. Usually they charge a $hundreds just to try, and more per gb they recover. They do this by removing the platters in a clean room and mounting them in a device that can perform the reads.

Otherwise, it's toast. Last ditch effort - throw it in a freezer for a day, and see if you can get the disk to mount. Rarely, this will work.

Draygo

freezer trick rarely fixes physical issues on dropped disks though. Its worth a shot.

most likely you are looking at a clean room type data recovery service or putting a nail through it and throw it in the electronics recycling bin.

Let this be a lesson for your friend in backing up.

spool32

Backing up 2TB of external HD data can be a challenge, if it turns over regularly. At current prices though, an extra $150 for a second disk you stick in a closet and pull out once a month to mirror... is way better than disaster.