Hard Drive Recovery Profile: Western Digital
February 15, 2007 by Victoria Stankard
Filed under Hard Drive How To's
Hard drive recovery profile: Western Digital. Every now and then we are going to profile products from the major hard drive manufacturers. This is the first in the series of a closer look at Western Digital. I have to throw in a disclaimer that we are not endorsing any hard disk over another. The fact is no matter who you choose to buy a hard drive from, they will all fail. Learn more about “Why Hard Drives Fail“. Keep in mind that it is important to back up your data and avoid hard drive recovery.
While it is true that we offer a discount to Western Digital hard drive customers on WD hard drive repair that is because they authorized our data recovery lab as worthy enough to open their drives without voiding the warranty. You can see our company on the Western Digital Authorized Data Recovery Companies page.
If we take a look at the amount of hard drives that are sent to us for data recovery, no one company has more failures than any other. Companies like Maxtor and Western Digital (Seagate now owns Maxtor) have a similar market share. That being said we get in about an equal amount of both. Cnet lists the most popular drives here:
 |
1 |
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 - hard drive - 80 GB - ATA-100 |
 |
2 |
Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500GB External Hard Drive |
|
3 |
Western Digital Caviar SE SATA 80 MB/s 120 GB Hard Drive |
 |
4 |
Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 250 GB hard drive |
As you can see Western Digital has 3 out of the 4 most popular hard drives being sold on cnet’s website right now. The best being the My Book 500GB. This is a great drive all around and is perfect for use as a primary backup device to prevent data recovery services.
Product Features
- Easy to set up, easy to use — This drive is all about simplicity. Plug it into your computer’s USB 2.0 port and start saving.
- Intelligent drive management features — The My Book drive turns itself on and off with your computer.
- Smart design — The elegant case, iconic of a book, takes up less space on your desk, stacks horizontally, and allows two or more drives to stand neatly together like volumes on a shelf.
- High quality hard drive — Inside the case is an exceptionally fast, ultra quiet, cool-running hard drive from Western Digital.
- Free Google™ software — Search your drive, manage your photos, and simplify Web searches with included Google software. Note:Google software is compatible with Windows 2000 and XP only.
These are just some of the features. Here is a link to the 3D Tour of the drive.
 |
It is pretty cool looking as well as being functional and it looks real good next to my husbands X-Box. We just got ours today and so far it works great! I transfered about 300GB of compressed FLAC files over to the drive, then decompressed them. The drive performed admirably and never slowed down. If you are looking for a solid back up solution, the My Book Essential is a great way to eliminate the high cost of hard drive recovery!
Next on the list is the Essential II which holds 1TB and is less than $600.00!
I have always like Western Digital drives. I guess it is a combination of things. I have found them to be sturdy for the most part. I also have had an excellent experience with the company support staff.
I bought the western digital 500GB my book essential and copied 4 drives 80GB each over to it so I could reformat the drives and install fresh copies of Windows on two of my computers. Drive worked fine the first two days I used it. Reformated the drives installed XP on both machines and went to copy my data back over to the machines and the WD my book has failed. Just grinds when turned on and is not recognized by any of the computers I have. So much for Western Digital back up power!
Rob,
Sorry to hear about your problems. It is true that ANY hard drive is a roll of the dice. While I have had good luck with My Book’s I have had bad luck with Maxtors. I bought 4 250GB Dimond Max drives a year or so ago, and every one of them failed within 4 months! Other people have not had any problems with them, but have had trouble with Hitachis. We just have to be double careful with our critical data, because every hard drive will fail, its not a matter of if, but when.
I have 3 My Book’s now and haven’t had any issues, my 500GB is the one that I use in my home studio so it is constantly transferring music files back and forth and is almost always on. I guess I am just lucky so far. It is true that WD drive do have a tendency to grind. When they fail, they fail, but I don’t have statistics that show they fail more than any other drives. Believe me, when I ask our engineers “what drive should I use?” they all give different answers. If we were to look at the volume of hard drives that come in here for recovery, it would seem that Maxtors and Seagates are the worst drive, but that isn’t true, because they are sold more than any other drive. I am fortunate in that we get discounts on hard drives so I have multiple backup solutions in place. I have backups for the backups. My only recommendation is to save as much of your critical data as often as you can!
I bought my drive in February. It just failed. So much for backup. Equipment typically lasts 2 days (as in the case mentioned) or 2 years. It’s pretty unacceptable, frankly.
I had the WD MyBook 500GB Premium edition for just over one year when all of a sudden it DIED. Started making clicking noises and no longer appears for any computer. From what I’m being told, the drive has truly crashed and its highly unlikely that anything can be salvaged. I did a search for “western digital my book clicking failure” and boy did I find out just how common this is and it always seems to happen just after the warranty expires. I am not happy at all.
I too have just experienced the dreaded clicking failure on my WD MyBook 500GB drive. I have VERY important data backed up onto this (which is why I bought this in the first place). Anybody know what my options are for recoving the data?
My WD MyBook 500GB started overheating and failing after 2 months. It is in a well ventilated area. I suspected it was failing from the heat since it would come back after cooling down. I even installed a room air conditioner so it wouldn’t get too hot in my office. It seemed to stop getting the regular: run for 8 hours, fail, unplug and cool down, then plug back in to start working again. But yesterday it failed again and this time it plugs back in, but it says the drive is not formatted. Which means I lost all my data or send it to a hard drive recovery place (like dtidata) to try and get the data back. But I’ve had it for less than a year and I don’t want to have to try and recover something from an unreliable drive. Don’t rely on this drive unless you planning on using it only for short periods of time.
My MyBook Essentials failed after just under 17 months. With a one year warranty, and having paid $250 for the drive back then, it’s unacceptable.
I got my MyBook 500GB in June - it failed three weeks ago. I paid just under $200 for it and almost $250 to have the data recovered by a service. Luckily when it went down (first Firewire port stopped being recognized and then USB port stopped being recognized) I didn’t try anything and stopped trying to get the drive to be recognized. Most of my data was salvaged - there were 3 other MyBook 500GB’s besides mine in for recovery - luckily my drive and one other were able to have data recovered. I’m no longer using MyBook. I’m now religiously backing up on DVD, as well as two external drives.
I have owned a WD MyBook Premium Edition for about 6 months. It runs pretty quiet and cool. It has about 500GB storage and I managed to fill it up with 200 GB of my video and pictures from my overseas trips, my contract work data and University Thesis including recorded interviews.
A week ago while using it I noticed that the folder containing 150BG of data was empty. I immediately looked at all the folders and most of them were empty with a couple of exceptions. Even the ones that were not empty did not allow me to open the files.
I did check and to my surprise the same thing was shown on other machines. All machines are installed with NAV with daily virus signature upgrade and weekly scans. I had absolutely no issues with their hard drives or any other software installed on those machines.
I can still see the drive and directory structure in explorer and the drive is not noisier than before.
I downloaded the check disk utility provided by Wester Digital and ran it.
The first check stopped midway with an error code that does not appear in the list of errorcodes published by Western Digital.
The second type of check ran for 10 minutes and then displayed a “too many errors” message. It took me about 45 minutes to fill out all the extensive information Western Digital support page is asking for as mandatory to submit an inquiry. During that I discovered that the Western Digital utility that shows the type number was producing a different type number from the one printed on the box. After 3 days of waiting I finally got a stock response saying that Wester Digital does not know the explanation for all the error code produced by the Western Digital utility and a bunch of links for data recovery partners of Western Digital. I emailed back saying that is unacceptable for the support not to talk to the developers of the utility and ask for error code explanation. That was a week ago and I got no further response since.
It’s important to note that my WD MyBook Premium Edition was not dropped or hit and it was always disconnected using the appropriate Windows utility. Since then I tried several non-intrusive data recovery utilities and none of them were successful so far in reading any data off the disk.
I guess I’ll have to pay the 1000 $ and ship it to another company.
The drive is convenient to use as long as it works and you might be inclined (because it’s big) to put all kind of data. That leads to a very dangerous situation where all your data can be lost and the only thing you get is “talk to somebody else” from the manufacturers.
Beware.
Good Luck
Klip
Klip,
Since the drive is recognized there is a good chance that our Free FAT 32 data recovery software can recover your data. You can get the software and read about how to use it here:
http://www.dtidata.com/usb_external_hard_drive_data_recovery.htm
Also feel free to call our software support team at 727-345-9665.
This software is free and is the full version. And yes we do support even our free software!
If you have any questions you can also call me direct at 727-251-2058.
Michael Stankard
I have my book essential. This is my second one and both had the same problem. They run for a short amount of time and then for no reason the usb is not recognized.Never again.
I have a WD 250g hard drive and the computer does not recognize the device to even use that program. Is everything completely lost or is there a way to fix it so the hard drive is recognized by the computer?
Peter,
Have you tried taking the hard drive out of the case and hooking it up as a slave? There is a tutorial on how to hook up a drive as a slave here:
http://www.dtidata.com/resourcecenter/2007/04/23/how-to-slave-hard-drive/
If that doesn’t work then you probably will need data recovery. If the drive is recognized as a slave then we have software that can recover your files.
HOW DO WE RESTORE FILES THAT WAS SAVED TO THE WD-HARDDRIVE , BACK TO OUR C:\ DRIVE???
WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO SET UP A BACKUP SCHEDULE FOR USE ON THE WD-80GB HARD DRIVE….MODEL NO. WD800XMS-00.
THANKS FOR THE ASSISTANCE.
PIERCE
I hear you. My My Book 500GB Essential Edition just failed today. At first my PC recognized it as LocalDisk instead of MyBook, but I could not access it. I surfed around and found chkdsk to be useful — it actually worked and I was able to get some of the files off of my My Book. In the middle of backing up the drive it failed again, this time it buzzed.. then started to click. I’ve only had the HD for 8 months and my Warranty ended in October (how fitting!) I don’t think I’d trust the My Book line again. I’m thankful I got the more important data off of it before it died for good. Garbage.
I bought a WD 1TB My Book Essential about 3 days ago at Best Buy. I reformatted the drive to NTSC and have spent two days copying about 200GB of home videos to the drive. Most of this 200GB was copied today. I came into the den a short time ago to see if the latest transfers had been completed. What I found was that the window for the new WD had closed and when I reopened it and clicked on the WD drive to open it I got a message that the drive was not formatted and did I want to format it now!! The drive WAS formatted successfully the day that I purchased the unit — it took several hours to accomplish this. Is there and easy fix to this? I recognize that I can reformat it and go to all the trouble (time) of moving a multitude of files again (I had expected to put about 700-800GB of videos on this drive), but will this problem resurface again? Has anyone run into anything like this? Thanks.
Francis
I got a 500 gig WD My Book for X-mas. 3 days ago I had an MP3 folder with almost 50 gigs of my CDs ripped to it. I plug the drive in today to listen to some and the MP3 folder is apparently empty. The other folders on it that I created are all there and intact, but out of nowhere my main one (which took a long bloody time to create I might add) is supposedly empty?
Right clicking on the My Book in Explorer shows that almost 50 gigs are being used, but none of my other folders are even close to a gig, so where are my MP3’s?
Does anyone have a solution to this kind of issue?
G-Man,
Same story with me. I can’t find my music in the folder that I saved them under. My videos are okay, but for some reason the music folder says it’s empty and whenever I click on it, it gives me an option to format it. What the hell? Does anyone have any answers on this?
All my mp3’s a vanished, i cannot believe it. It took me years to collect them. safe to say i won’t be buying WD again… my videos are still there but for how long???
I also purchased a 250GB MyBook from Best Buy specifically for backing up our digital photos and about 60 gigs of mp3’s. This thing had worked for about a year or so since we bought it. I swapped the drive from our desktop [XP] to our media center PC [XP] and it asked if I wanted to format the drive. I didn’t see the usual autoplay popup that occurs when I first plug into the USB or the Firewire. I tried to open the drive on my work laptop [XP] and on other computers, with no luck. I’m very disappointed and frustrated. Other posts mention heat and clicking sounds, but I’ve never had any of those issues. Definitely going to backup to DVD from now on…
WD must stand for Worst Drive. i bought 3 all 3 failed in less than a week.
After I loaded them with data believing it was safe. NOT.
Honestly, I could never again spend a dine on WD Product.
Same problem, WD drive was working fine for months, then one day it died. Hooked it up to a variety of computers, XP, 2k, Vista, Apple OSX 10.3-10.5 and nothing.
Going to remove the drive from the enclosure and see if it can be mounted directly.
It sounds like this product is defective and a complaint should be filed with the BBB
I have been using my My Book for about a week; it seemed to be backing up things just fine. Today I plugged it into the wall socket and then the computer and the icon never popped up. I unplugged it and tried it on another computer; same thing. Now when I just plug it into the wall socket and NOT in the computer yet, it starts like normal for approx. 5 secs and then just dies out.
I am a total rookie with all this and I need help.
This could be a variety of faults. Check all the power connections make sure that everything is plugged in and is not lose. Also, listen to the drive and see if you here any clicking. It may not be loud so you may need to get close the drive. If you here clicking you would want to stop powering the drive. Contact dtidata if you need data recovery services.
My MyBook Essential 160G went belly-up about two weeks ago. Typical clicking death, about . I had my backup software set to “syncronize” so I still had ALL my data on my working internal hard drive. I opened the case and found the drive was a WD160JS SATA drive. I bought an OEM-style SATA replacement (WD1600AAJS, $44.95 USD) and was dissapointed I didn’t notice the original drive had a legacy-style power connection. I modified the case a bit (drilled two 1/4″ holes opposite the case-side screws mounting the drive itself) to extract only the drive and cut an access hole in the bottom of the case to accept a Legacy-to-SATA power adapter cable. Voila’!!!!! I’m back in business. AND…more important….the new drive is QUIET - QUIET - QUIET. The original drive sounded like a small helicopter spooling up on my desk! All functions seem to work as usual. The drive still spools down after 10 minutes of non-use. Hope this one lasts longer than the original!!
BobK,
Thanks for the post Bob! This is great information and we are going to put it to the test in our data recovery lab. We will post in here the results.
Michael
I also have the WD My Book 500 GB. I’ve had it for about 2 years, and it has finally failed. I am getting the infamous clicking sound. It starts to load and then just stops spinning and I have a solid light, but not a sound after that. I wanted to take out the hard drive to see if I can do some data recovery myself, but I can’t figure out how to dismantle the book. I have hundreds and hundreds of pics and music files, not to mention word and excel doc, and many other docs I scanned in for safe keeping. What was I thinking!? Does anyone know how to open the My Book?
Terri,
Clicking usually means that the heads have failed and the hard drive will need to be recovered in a clean room. If you want to try and hook it up you will have to break it out of the case which means you can’t take it back. If you don’t care then you can use a thin screwdriver to pry the case apart right under where the screws would go. I was able to open it without breaking it. There are no screws holding it together.
Michael, In your experience, what are the chances of retrieving my data off this hard drive? I am waiting for a quote from dti. I’ll tear it apart if I have to, at this point I am only interested in retreiving my files. Terri
Terri,
We have a very high success rate on hard drive recovery. In fact the video in the right hand column towards the top of this page is a hard drive that was in a fire, then doused with water while they were putting the fire out! We were able to recover that data so yours shouldn’t be that bad.
As far as opening the case, you shouldn’t have to tear it up, just use the tip of a thin screwdriver and work it around the lip of the case. If you can set it up as a slave and it is recognized by the BIOS you can run software on it to recover your files. Our software support is open until 10 EST or you can call the emergency number 727-251-2058 for assistance.
western digital ! a right piece of sh@t had my 320 gb for around 3 months and now it wont open some folders and some folders have precious things to me . if u pull the ubs wire out when its stuck not opening ur folder for a brief moment all the items in the folder show up then disapear as it closes off from the connection brake . so damn anoying and i want to smash the thing to bits !!!! and no matter how much some one says all hard drives fail , you are ment to get good use out of them before they do !! .
I too have a non-working WD MyBook 500. I pulled the drive itself out of the housing to see if I could slave and salvage it. Computer would not boot to Windows with it connected, but it will boot to safe mode, after about a 5 minute delay. It shows up in disk manager with the drive letter E: assigned, but does not display in My Computer.
A friend who also had the same drive fail similarly was able to get the drive working again (without saving any of his data) by performing a full format, not the quick format. Thankfully this drive was not the only copy of my data, so I am 30 minutes into that process and it currently says 2% complete. I’ll let it run overnight, and while I’m at work tomorrow if need be, and we’ll see what happens from there. I am not optimistic.
All in all, what a horrific product. Everyone I know who has gotten one has had it fail in short order. I understand the failure rate of hard drives is 100% given enough time, but the “Mean Time Between Failure” of this drive seems to be measured in months, not years. The folks at Western Digital should be embarrassed that this product bears their name.
My MyBook 500 gig, died, with the similar, locking up due to heat. Tried formatting repeatedly but it wouldn’t stay alive long enough. Removed the drive from the book housing, installed it into my pc… and… voila. Vista detected new drive, I formatted it. It seemingly works. Just so everyone knows, the drive is a Caviar. Perhaps this will help some folks, at least salvage the drive itself. Seems to be working so far as normal.
I had a Mybook 500G with all my precious ireplacables that failed 2 weeks ago with the dreaded clicking sound. But I was smart. I had that backed up on a WD 1TB that failed today before I had a chance to get a replacement for the first. *@(^$!*$^*&&*$^!*&
DepressedWDuser,
Your 1TB is one of those green caviars correct? It is possilbe that you can get the data off of it without needing to have the drive opened in our clean room. Have you taken it out of the case yet?
Chris,
I wouldn’t take too many chances on the drive. You could clone it or copy all your data off of it, then replace it. If it locked up once, it is likely to happen again.
After a long 3-6 month period of attempting to find out what was causing blue screens on my computer, I ended up replacing the Abit BE7-RAID mobo with an ASRock PC-PRO and a new Corsair 550W PSU. Everything went well until I started having problems with the ASRock board. Sound would stop working and then some of the supplemental Maxtor HDDs were losing their partitions. They were being used for backup images so it wasn’t that big of a deal.
But then things got worse quickly. My main Western Digial start chkdsk’ing all the time. I thought it was a bad hard drive driver. It kept dropping into PIO mode 4 which is very slow. Replacing the driver did not fix the problem. Then chkdsk failed with an “unspecified error.”
I got into the windows recovery console and I was able to chkdsk my way from there. After that the drive would not boot but I could see all of my files. I had another Western Digital of the same model so I used Data Lifeguard to copy the partition to that other hard drive. Then on the main drive I think the partition got lost so I couldn’t see anything.
I thought the drive went bad so I pulled it and put in the partition copied one and I tried to to a Windows Repair but the whole machine froze on Installing Network. After that it looks like I lost my partition. Now I’m not sure if I’m sunk.
Now I’m sure it’s the new mobo but did I lose everything? I think the data is still there. The Western Digitals are pulled and I bought an Intel mobo this time. I tried to look at some of my supplemental Maxtors last night but all 3 of them would not show up the BIOSs of 3 different machines!
Sorry this is so long. I’m just in shock right now.
Robert F.
Ok, first thing is step back and take a deep breath. We can absolutely help you get your data back! We have some tools that can recover your data. What operating system are you using? If I understand you correctly, you have 1 hard drive (Western Digital) that had your OS and other partitions on it, and you have how many Maxtors? When you say they just had images on it, what kind of backups are they?
We want to stay away from chkdisk because it can damage hard drives so don’t let that run again.
We can get you set up with some partition repair tools as well as data recovery tools based upon the asnwers to your questions. I am also going to bring Jacqui in on this since she is the head of our tech support.
You can also call us direct at 866-418-3843 as well, but if you could leave your answers in here, our responses might help others out in the future.
My WD Backup hard drive is out of space.
How do I free up space for future incremental back ups?
My Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500GB External Hard Drive is not turning on…and i have truly essential files there. the unit is still under warranty but they are not recovering files. they do have authorized companies who can recover files but they’re too costly. any more options? i’m quite desperate…
Jen,
We are also an authorized Western Digital company and we do give discounts for hard drive recovery if that is what you need. The first thing to do is to see if a computer will recognize the hard drive outside the MyBook case. Unfortunately if you open the case you will void the warranty. We do have a no data no charge on all hard drive recovery services and if we don’t have to open up the hard drive itself, the data recovery will be under $400. You would also retain your warranty because we are authorized to open up the case. You can call us at 866-418-3843 or leave any questions in here.
hello all
i got me a WD 500Gb external hard drive (it is my 3rd, the first 2 died). i was enjoying my new 500Gb hard drive when suddenly it froze my computer when i tried to play a game off it, i thaugh “ok i will restart and try again”. it crashed again. it seamed sus. then, after i restarted the computer my suspicions were confirmed, the drive was named “local disk” when that was not the name i gave it and the icon it normally displays was gone, i tried to access it, and it was not formatted (according to windows). then the computer soon did not recognise it at all! it did not display in My Computer and according to device manager in windows it is recognised as “WD” when it should be recognised as something a bit more descriptive
this is the 3rd 500 Gb external i have gone through this year and i am loosing my nerve over this.
is all hope lost? and to what extent could my files be damaged?
I have the same problem as scott. except i have a 1Tb WD caviar (green) internal. less than 2 weeks installed. computer sees it but only sees a 32Mb partition instead of the 600G that it should be, wants to format it and no longer has the name that i gave it. only the “local drive”. would the repartition tool fix that? or do i need to do a data recovery? Win XP pro SP3
Don’t think ill get a WD again though.
My 500 gig WD hard drive is clicking and not recognizable - I have 2 years worth of work on this hard drive and some of the projects on this drive I have been working on for like 6 months. I lost everything - DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BUY THIS DRIVE - If someone gave it to me I would say “you want o see a WD drive in 6 months?” then I would throw it in a toilet and say “thats where all your favorite songs and hard work are gonna go if you buy this drive. IMO..
i am so pissed right now.
Just as many others…I have a WD MyBook Premium 500GB drive. It first started to buzz and had data errors. Now it only clicks repeatedly when I turn it on. I have an older WD 250 (pre MyBook) and it’s still going strong (knock on wood).