quigsby

I think my WD 4 terabyte external drive just failed, what's the best recovery software to try and get it back?? I am sick, all my photos are on this drive, hope some one can help

anotherview Loc: California

Take it to a competent computer technician. A local camera club might recommend one to you. Avoid taking things into your own hands unless you feel qualified to resolve this technical matter. Your precious photographs deserve special attention, to save them intact.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

May or may not be the drive. Could be the cable, USB port, and controller card in the enclosure or external power supply (if either are used). First, is the drive spinning? (You can feel and hear it). Have you rebooted the computer it is hooked to? Let’s go through it step-by-step...

anotherview Loc: California

Ooops.

quigsby

Hooked it up to my MacBook Pro and still not recognized, swapped my laptop backup and checked the ports on the iMac and drives all show up. I am on. a brand new iMac. Tried disk utility disc repair and repair failed. The disk does spin up and I hear no death clicks.

Quixdraw Loc: x

Don't know where you are, but we've had good luck with Best Buy Geek Squad.

quigsby

I ran first aid from disk utility and the operation failed, so it sees the disk , but won't mount it

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

What file system is the drive formatted with?

quigsby

OS X Extended (Journaled)

quigsby

The drive does show up in disk utility, but its greyed out and won't mount from the utility itself

johnst1001a Loc: West Chester, Ohio

i had a similar issue with a new mac. if you have access to a mac store take it there first. there could be a slight change in how the computer sees files. second best buy,
goes without saying, gotta have backups,
since i had all my files backed up, actually double backed ups, i reformatted reformatted the disk, have not had an issue, still double back up. mt work process is to save my photos in a file on my ssd , which was 0.5 tb, work on post processing from the sdd for speed of drive. then when iim done i save the fil to a second 8tb non ssd drive. not i still have the originals on the sd card from the camera. since mt camera has dual card capability, i aslso use that to record jpegs as a backup. i then save all my jpegs to the 8tb drive as well, untouched. only takes a few minutes for a days worth of photo files.
i am a heavy user of my computer, used own my own company, so disk drive failures are not a a stranger to me. i had two computer drive failures, symptom, computer would not boot, second one hear clicking, drive was not recognized, third drive not recgnized, reformatted, still works an my embarrasing one, i had movered my drive, and the power cable pulled out.
another thing have considered is to buy 512mb SD cards and never delete the files. thats a lot of pictures.
oh my 8tb drive is accessible as a network drive, i can access all the files on it via the internet from a different computer.

Al Beatty Loc: Boise, Idaho

Hi quigsby,

I had a similar problem. I took the non-working drive to my local computer repair shop and they moved the hard drive to a new housing and waah laah!, I had a working drive again. The cost was less than $50.00. The same might work for you. Take care & ...

AndyGarcia

I have 4 of these drives. Quite often partitions do not mount. ON Mac OS I go to Disk Utility "unmount" the partition then "remount" it. It works.

I have no idea what you do on Windows machines.

A suggestion, which you might like to consider, get another drive as a backup or use cloud technology. I have duplicates of my back up disks to try to avoid this problem.

Good luck.

nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

Another case that demonstrates why you should not rely on one storage device to contain all your valuable data. Even a brand-new drive can mechanically/electrically fail or
become corrupted and unreadable.

Having a very large single drive is dangerous, because you think you can keep everything you have in one convenient place.

BACKUPBACKUPBACKUP!!!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

One last question. Is the drive connected via USB or Thunderbolt? If Thunderbolt, then there is a protocol conversion card in the enclosure which could be bad (the drive’s native connection is either USB or SATA). If it were a PC, I would remove the drive from the case and connect it directly to the computer, but this isn’t easy to do with a Mac.

You mentioned OSX as the OS, but not the file system. If it’s APFS or HFS+, then I can’t be of further help, since I’m not that experienced with Macs, but if it’s NTFS and the drive is USB connected, then you could attach it to a PC and do further work from there. Maybe one of the Mac gurus can assist with some suggestions for a drive utility. By all means, do NOT format the disc. You didn’t say if the data is backed up. If it is, then just replace and rebuild or replace the drive. If not, then you may be willing to go to more extensive (and expensive) lengths to save your data.

Good luck