All about recycle bin data recovery
3 min readWorking with huge amounts of information? You know the desperate moment when you realize that you need some information that you deleted a long time ago. This is the topic of this post : Top methods to recover lost data from WD external hard drive. 1st lets start with some general data recovery advices, valid for all type of data devices, PC’s, Mac’s, phones.
Use cloud storage. For most regular users, cloud storage services represent the most reliable way how to protect themselves against data loss. Providers of these services are commonly located on the other side of the planet, and they use sophisticated backup systems at their storage facilities, resulting in multiple degrees of redundancy. Best of all, services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive have free plans with generous storage limits, which are more than enough for text documents.
If this works, use the working Mac to make copies of the files you need most (photos, documents, etc.). Once you’ve done that, you’re free to wipe or repair the disk, hopefully getting that original laptop working again. To do this, restart the computer and hold down CMD+R until you see the Apple logo or a spinning globe. From MacOS Utilities, select Disk Utility. Pick the topmost drive on the left, and select First Aid or Repair. If it works, this will solve lots of issues, including a wonky drive.
Is the drive making a beeping sound on powering up? This is an indication of a mechanical failure. Either the drive is suffering from stiction (read/write heads of the drive parking over the data area of the platter instead of their dedicated ramp when not in use) or a seizure of the motor spindle around which the platters rotate (this can happen due to dropping of the drive). Both these failures need the drive to be opened and thus need it to be sent to a data recovery service center.
There are two main causes of failure here, either a TVS diode (fuse) has shorted due to overvoltage, or a vital component on the PCB has failed. Hard drive PCBs often have two TVS diodes which act as fuses to protect your drive in the event of a power spike. There will most likely be two of these: one for the 5v and one for the 12v rail. If you accidentally plugged in the wrong power adapter to your external drive, or you experienced a power surge, a TVS diode might have sacrificed itself. If the shorted TVS diode is the only casualty and the rest of the PCB components are OK, then simply removing the shorted diode is enough to bring the drive back to life.
Older laptops that were constructed with traditional hard drives were fairly simple to pop open and fix. You could unscrew a few screws holding the case together, and then plug into the drive via a universal SATA port to retrieve the data. Opening the actual drive itself is not without risk, or advisable, as dust could and will enter the drive, causing contamination and potentially additional damage during the process. For example, older drives would be subject to something called stiction, and sometimes became ‘stuck’, whereby the head and actuator were locked or stuck and the motor failed to spin, causing the hard drive platters to spin improperly. One trick that had some reported success involved placing a hard drive in the freezer, which would cause the metal to contract and become unstuck, at least long enough to offload the data.
DoYourData can help you easily recover deleted, formatted or lost files from WD Elements portable hard drive including WD Elements 500GB, WD Elements 750GB, WD Elements 1TB, WD Elements 1.5TB, WD Elements 2TB etc. DoYourData also can recover lost data from other kind of devices, such as hard drive, USB drive, Memory card, SD card etc. Read extra details at Western Digital hard drive data recovery.