External Hard Drive woes

[CobraBob]

one of my ext hdd took a dump last year. i was freaking out. thought i was going to have to pay big $$ to retrieve it.

did a lot of reading online and found this software
Data Rescue 3 Review & Rating | PCMag.com

downloaded it directly online. worked like a CHAMP! i was able to pull all my stuff off my ext hdd.

Is Data Rescue 3 for Macs only?

 

[RDJ]

I have and use the WD "My passport" 1 and 2TB drives exclusively. I HAD one of the "my book world" drives and the circuit board crapped out on me. I will never own another one. but the "my passport" drives are the shit. I have used them for 4 and 5 years without any issues.

I didnt "tear" it apart. Only the outer case was removed which slides off. Saw it had a different board. put it back together. Lesson learned.

**EDIT**
I also thought about keeping the drive. I was going to reformat it and start with a blank slate. Get a generic drive controller with a generic case. Once I hopefully pull the information off the current drive, I will put it all on the blank drive. That way if I have a bad controller again(assuming that is the end issue), it will be cheap and easy to source parts and it will be backed up on two drives though it would be a pain to back it up on both all the time.

 

[RDJ]

I wish that were the case. From what I understand from online research(because the internet cant lie, lol) is that the WD hard drive controllers for my books encrypt the data. The encyption is supposedly unique to the model of board. This is why I'm trying to hunt it down. If I understand, I cant just mount it and read it like any other drive. The information will be there, but I can't read it..

unless this is a recent development where they do it by default then it is untrue. it IS however a different filing system which windows (pre win7 I do NOT know about Win 7 or 8) cannot read by default. when my WD MYBOOK WORLD went bad I simply took it out of its case installed it in my tower and downloaded a program that allowed windows to read the filing system. I then saved the data off, reformated the disk NTFS and am still using it as a hard drive in my tower. this was like 4 years ago.