DTI Data Recovery an authorized Western Digital data recovery partner for 15 years.

Through a special arrangement with Western Digital we are happy to extend a 10% discount to all Western Digital customers. Our data recovery engineers have developed tools and methods tailored specifically to recover WD hard drives. Having been a Western Digital partner form more than a decade we have been fortunate to be on the forefront of new hard drive technology as it emerges from the largest provider of hard disk storage. With the experience this relationship has fostered we are able to quickly and accurately diagnose hard drive failures and perform data recovery at a very high success rate.

When you call us, please refer to the following reference # to receive Western Digital preferred pricing on your data recovery: DTWD060. We also provide our Western Digital customers with a complimentary copy of our Recover It All Now data recovery software. Recover It All Now is a software solution to recover lost data from soft crashes such as: missing, corrupt or deleted partition, boot sector corruption, file deletion, quick format etc.  Recover It All Now should not be used if the drive is making clicking sounds, not spinning or has excessive bad sectors.

Common signs of failing read/write heads:

• Drive spins up and clicks several times and spins down
• Constant clicking from the hard drive
• User can see data on the hard drive but the data cannot be copied or accessed. Drive may click or spin down.

Signs that data recovery software may be appropriate:

• Can view the full size of the drive in ‘Disk Management’ but identifies as ‘Raw’ or ‘Unallocated’.
• Performed and initialization and or a ‘Quick Format’ of the wrong drive.
• File deletion
• Virus

In order to take some of the guess work out of diagnosing hard drives that may be on the cusp of complete failure we have compiled a program called Hard Drive Engine ( a Link to our Free Western Digital Hard Drive Engine software is here) . 

This software is helpful in scenarios where hard drives may have one degraded head or perhaps something less catastrophic like bad sectors. Hard Drive Engine for Western Digital hard drives looks at S.M.A.R.T attributes to determine how many sectors the drive has reallocated because they were found slow to read or write. Additionally, how many Uncorrectable Sectors were found, how many sectors are Pending Reallocation, and the age of the drive itself.  After analysis of the drive its provides a pass, caution, or fail outcome of the drive’s health.

Furthermore, you can perform a critical short read test of the drive. This reads sectors where file system components are found and provides a pass or fail result. The software also provides a longer NIST:800 slice read that reads 10% of the total sectors in slices that that do not overlap and provides a pass or fail indicator based on bad sectors found.

If you have found your Western Digital hard drive is not mechanically failing you can choose to clone it to another hard drive or save the drive as an image file to another hard drive.  If your hard drive is operational it may be a good idea to make a copy, having a redundant set of data can be a life saver if something goes wrong.

More about Western Digital hard drive recovery:

As hard drive space has increased exponentially over the last decade so have the configurations and ways data is organized on-disk. Western Digital manufacturers and distributes a large variety of offerings.  All of the newer Western Digital My Passport, Easy Store, and other 2.5 inch form factor external drives have been using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) since 2017. (SMR) allows manufacturers like Western Digital to take advantage of wasted space used by the cone shaped write that is roughly 5 times larger than the read element by overlapping writes at the offset of the read channel. As you can imagine this would complicate how a drive keeps track of the data it is storing and how things have changed with Western Digital hard drive repair.

Traditionally, drives had one Translator.  In short, the Translator translated Logical Block Addressing (LBA) from Physical Block Addressing (PBA).  There are many Physical Blocks or sectors of the drive that are not accessible to us as they may have been found defective at the time of manufacturing and been assigned to the Permanent Defect List (P-List) during burn-in, they may be part of the System Partition or System Area (SA), where the manufacturer stores the brains of the hard drive. The (SA) stores the defect lists, translator, microcode, zone allocation tables, all of the information the drive needs to function. The (SA) on Western Digital hard drives using (SMR) now hold a Secondary Translator.

The Secondary Translator in Western Digital hard drives works much like NAND translators and uses bands to store data instead of tracks.  Because the writes are shingled we can no longer read it in a way that is efficient using traditional methods.  The Secondary Translator knows exactly how many sectors are located in each band and what head will read each grouping of sectors in the band. While this does increase storage it does not boost speed. In fact, it is slower that traditional recording. That said, how does what is going on under the hood affect Western Digital customers?

Concern should lie where accidents happen or Murphy’s law rears it’s head. Accidental format of these external drives will null the Secondary Translator, and that is No Bueno! After format your data will appear to be all nulls or 00’s.  Traditional data recovery software will not help, there will be nothing left to reconstruct. Fortunately, we can force the drive to use PBA and simulate band reads to reconstruct data. Using a company like DTI Data Recovery to recover a Western Digital hard drive using (SMR) after accidental format is the only ways to recover any data.

Keeping up with Technology is a full time job in R&D and practical application.  We hope to earn your business with ability, results, and customer service.

Get a Recover It Now Discount Code for a complimentary download: Coupon Code WD-RIA

Western Digital produces a wide variety of storage options including:

• WD SATA 3.5 and 2.5 standalone hard drives
• Western Digital external drives: WD My Book, WD My Book DUO, WD Elements, WD Passport, WD Easy Store external usb hard drives.
• Western Digital Personal Cloud Storage: WD My Book Live, WD My Cloud, My Cloud Mirror, My Cloud EX2, My Cloud EX 4
• Business Solution: WD Sentinel

DTI Data Recovery is an industry leading data recovery company with an independently verified class 100 clean room that is biometrically secure.

• Online Drive Tracker™ System to track your hard drive recovery.
• No Data No Charge – Data Guarantee
• Flat Rate Pricing
• Free Evaluation

Visit Western Digital’s data recovery partner page to verify that DTI is a partner.