Hey everyone, this is my first post here.
I'm the not-so-proud owner of a 320 gig WD My Passport hard drive. I got the drive as a gift less then one year ago and just this last week, while being plugged into a Windows XP computer, it stopped working without any sign of trouble beforehand.
The hard drive was plugged into a computer running Windows XP SP2. The computer wasn't particularly healthy one and also had a few viruses, all of which were quarantined by NOD32 earlier that day. The hard drive was plugged in next to three other 3.5" drives and had a single audio file being accessed from it, imported into Adobe Premiere Pro. After we were done using the drive, we shut down Premiere, did NOT save the project and were about to eject my passport drive when Windows displayed a waning message saying the drive "could not be written to". I didn't get the problem, this hasn't ever happened before. I checked in My Computer and the drive didn't show up. I checked in the safe removal menu in the task bar, but the drive wasn't displayed there either. I unplugged the drive and plugged it back in and saw as Windows attempted to install the driver for a hard drive, that it has already seen a dozen times, and then fail at doing so. Then came the bubble notification that there might be a few problems while attempting to use the drive. Duh.
Obviously the drive hasn't shown up since. All computers, running either XP, Vista, Linux or OS X recognize the drive to some extent but all fail to open it or have it show up in any kind of file browser.
Now normally I'd just give a crap and get a new drive; after all it was something like a hundred bucks when I got it. But 1) that was in March, about half a year ago and 2) I am lucky enough not having made a backup f 200 gigs worth of stuff on the drive.
IF I lived in the states things would be super-easy: get in touch with WD's support and ask (demand) them to pay for my data recovery at some specialized company. But I don't live in the states. I'm in Hungary and WD doesn't even have a support office or any form of official representation here.
I've already disassembled the drive and I see that the problem is most likely with the USB to SATA connection, but tearing off the USB circuit from the drive's hull would probably open up the drive itself which I most certainly do NOT want to do.
So what would be the wisest thing? Should I try taking apart the drive until the SATA port is accessible? Should I give it to some garage genius to try and do something with it? Or should I go ahead and take it to the local data recovery company and pay the $400 to have my stuff saved? This data is super-super important to me and is irreplaceable. I NEED to have it back.
What are your suggestions? I've looked around on countless forums includng this one, but all people say is "use this magicware program!!", but I don't want to use something that came out of the basement of a teenager. Please help, I'm kinda desperate...
P.s.: Sorry for the super-long post, I'm pretty damn frustrated with this whole thing.
I'm the not-so-proud owner of a 320 gig WD My Passport hard drive. I got the drive as a gift less then one year ago and just this last week, while being plugged into a Windows XP computer, it stopped working without any sign of trouble beforehand.
The hard drive was plugged into a computer running Windows XP SP2. The computer wasn't particularly healthy one and also had a few viruses, all of which were quarantined by NOD32 earlier that day. The hard drive was plugged in next to three other 3.5" drives and had a single audio file being accessed from it, imported into Adobe Premiere Pro. After we were done using the drive, we shut down Premiere, did NOT save the project and were about to eject my passport drive when Windows displayed a waning message saying the drive "could not be written to". I didn't get the problem, this hasn't ever happened before. I checked in My Computer and the drive didn't show up. I checked in the safe removal menu in the task bar, but the drive wasn't displayed there either. I unplugged the drive and plugged it back in and saw as Windows attempted to install the driver for a hard drive, that it has already seen a dozen times, and then fail at doing so. Then came the bubble notification that there might be a few problems while attempting to use the drive. Duh.
Obviously the drive hasn't shown up since. All computers, running either XP, Vista, Linux or OS X recognize the drive to some extent but all fail to open it or have it show up in any kind of file browser.
Now normally I'd just give a crap and get a new drive; after all it was something like a hundred bucks when I got it. But 1) that was in March, about half a year ago and 2) I am lucky enough not having made a backup f 200 gigs worth of stuff on the drive.
IF I lived in the states things would be super-easy: get in touch with WD's support and ask (demand) them to pay for my data recovery at some specialized company. But I don't live in the states. I'm in Hungary and WD doesn't even have a support office or any form of official representation here.
I've already disassembled the drive and I see that the problem is most likely with the USB to SATA connection, but tearing off the USB circuit from the drive's hull would probably open up the drive itself which I most certainly do NOT want to do.
So what would be the wisest thing? Should I try taking apart the drive until the SATA port is accessible? Should I give it to some garage genius to try and do something with it? Or should I go ahead and take it to the local data recovery company and pay the $400 to have my stuff saved? This data is super-super important to me and is irreplaceable. I NEED to have it back.
What are your suggestions? I've looked around on countless forums includng this one, but all people say is "use this magicware program!!", but I don't want to use something that came out of the basement of a teenager. Please help, I'm kinda desperate...
P.s.: Sorry for the super-long post, I'm pretty damn frustrated with this whole thing.
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