Posted: 2/4/2015 8:40:46 PM EDT
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I have a WD 'My Passport', external HDD 1t for back-up that is not accessible.
Details... It will spin up and a blue light will flash, then stay solid. It is not recognized in Windows Explorer (no drive letter assigned), nor is it recognized in a DOS window. It appears in the system tray, but with no drive letter. In Control Panel > System > Device Manger > Properties - it shows as "This device is working properly". In Control Panel > Admin Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management - it shows as 'Unknown/Unallocated/Not Initialized' If I attempt to perform any actions on it (Initialize, online), I get the error message "The Request Could Not Be Performed Because of an I/O Device Error". I downloaded and ran 'WD Data Life Guard Diagnostics' and got the error message "Too Many Bad Sectors Detected" I've tried it on 3 different computers with the same results, tried a different cable and even tried accessing it through a Linux live CD... same results. Is this thing totally hosed? Any chance of recovering data short of shipping it out to data recovery service? |
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There are only so many sectors on a hard drive. When one goes bad, the system tries to move the data to a non-occupied sector.
No non-occupied sector? Too bad, so sad. You now have at least a corrupted file, and maybe a corrupted directory, or even a corrupted partition table. In the future, leave some (I usually go with 10%) of the disc not used (not partitioned). This is called "over-provisioning" and is one way discs can give a longer lifetime. |
