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Western Digital External Passport Drive is failing

This drive shows up in Disk Management as E:\ but has 500GB Free.   The disk did have information on it.

What is a way to go about trying to recover any data and-or assess how bad off this drive is at this point.?
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Serio27
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I use Ultimate Boot CD to securely wipe drives before deploying a new system. On this cd there are several data recovery apps which I am not familiar with but thought I would at least point you in the right direction. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

They also have Hard Drive diags to find what is wrong with the drive as well as Hard Drive cloning apps in case you want to clone the drive before making an attempt to recover the data this way you have a starting point to go back to should something go wrong.


http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

PhotoRec      6.12      GPL       Included in Parted Magic.
TestDisk      6.12      GPL       Included in Parted Magic.

John C.
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tailoreddigital
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Try connecting the HDD to another external HDD case as I have replaced so many WD cases with another case and it worked without issue as if how it was accessing before
you can try hdd regenerator trial, to see if it can fix the first sector; if so; buy it to run the full diag  http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html      
otherwise, i fear the data can only be recovered by recovery services, like these:
http://freedatarecovery.us/                              Free Data Recovery
http://www.lowcostrecovery.com/index.html                        data recovery Company
http://www.gillware.com/                                 "           "                   "
http://www.drivesavers.com/services/estimates.html                     "           "                   "
First of all open the box and connect this drive directly to onboard SATA connector. Then check if the problem still remains. If yes then get to WD web site and in downloads section find a HDD test tool. Download it and perform quick and long tests.
As for data recovery, try Recuva or GetDataBack www.runtime.org
It could be that the start of the drive contains bad sectors and thus the partition table is not available. But the data should be still there if it was not wiped knowingly.
noxcho , most of these drives do not have a sata interface; only USB
eg the 1 TB model
Means they use IDE drives inside??
NO, the usb interface is directly soldered to the disk logic board