Is there any way to save an external hard drive?

[wildman43]

Originally Posted by Kip

Surprisingly I just realized it is still under warranty. Unfortunately I don't think Western Digital will replace it since it isn't technically "defective".

I also have a WD hard drive; Do you have 1 or 2 hard drives as a back up. I have 2 in my WD.

When I dropped mine, I had a similar problem I opened the top pulled out the hared drives an put them back in. made sure they were in right put the lid back on no more problem.

Good luck call WD an tell them it just started making a clicking sound. an you don't know why

[Paul85]

Any observations, folks? The drives are functioning correctly, just that a partition is gone.

How do you know the drives are functioning correctly? From mechanical POV? Let's assume they are mechanically and electronically sound. If so, there's damage to partition table.

What to do? I'd plug the drive to an external SATA/eSATA connector, then backup existing data from the working partition. Then I would run any partition recovery software you'd like, for example diskpart or Partition Wizard and see if it finds missing partition. The data is probably still there, only the PT record is damaged. USE EXTREME CAUTION in committing any changes. Some of the software allows you to recover the found partition to another physical HDD, might get handy if you don't want to overwrite existing PT before you are sure it's the right partition. Having wiggle room is important because once you commit some changes data might be lost.

These problems might be indicative of other issues so making a full sector scan of the drive is recommended. I recommend you back up entire data from that HDD once you get the second partition back. Just in case. Do backups of backups of backups. Run the RW tests and surface scan and if they give you all clear, carry on but still do backups. I backup everything I can, and so do my clients. There's never too many backups.

Also: What are the write dates on second partition of the mirrored drive? Might give you some info on when this happened. Does the mirrored drive hold all the data intact? Does the software that runs the NAS have enough logs to try to backtrack what happened? Might be an interesting read.