I have a My Passport Essential 3.0. On Thursday, while I was using it, our building had an unexpected power outage from the city doing work on our street. I was transferring files onto my passport at the time, and lo and behold, when I booted my computer, it was borked. It appears empty and unformatted. When I mount it in Puppy Linux, I can see the files on it, but it mounts with errors and I have zero access to them. The drive does not click. It does light up.
I have spent every moment I’ve not been at work since Thursday trying to fix it. I would, of course, prefer to recover my files, but at this point, if I can just get the thing working again, I’d be happy.
I am operating on Windows XP Pro. I use Malwarebytes and Avast. My boyfriend has a computer with Windows 7 I have access to, and I have a Puppy Linux live CD. My drive does not always show in Disk Management, but when it does, it’s raw.
Here is what I’ve tried that I can think of off top of my head.
* Replacing the cord.
* Chkdsk, with /r /f /x modifiers. Errors with “Cannot open volume for direct access.”
* Formatting. Errors with “Specified drive does not exist.” If I try to format by right-clicking it and selecting to format, the window simply disappears without anything happening. When I try to format it through Disk Management, it fails with an error that I can’t recall the exact wording of ATM and it’s not appearing in my Disk Management window once again so I can’t find it, ahah.
* Recuva doesn’t see the drive at all, neither does Seatools.
* Find & Mount doesn’t recover anything.
* I can’t assign any partition to it in Disk Management.
* I can’t recall the specific error, but trying to use the GParted live cd fails.
* I’ve tried to run gparted through Puppy Linux as well, with no avail. ntfsprogs fails with “Volume is corrupt. You should run chkdsk.”
* I tried convert.exe. “Cannot determine filesystem of drive G:.”
* I ran fsutil with a repair option on the Win7 machine and got the error of “FSUTIL requires a local NTFS volume.”
* I have File Scavanger 3.0 and it turns up nothing.
* In desperation I tried fixmbr in the recovery console and it simply hangs for eternity. (I left it alone for two hours to no progress)
* I tried the WD Firmware Updater and it errors out with “Firmware application failed on specified drive.”
* Finally I uncased the drive to attempt to internally mount it, only to find that it’s not SATA as I hoped it’d be be. It’s some sort of proprietary thing I can do nothing with.
I just have no idea what to do. I don’t have the money to replace this drive and while I accept that my files are probably unrecoverable I would like them back if possible. I just want my drive to operate again and I know due to the circumstances that it’s not an HD failure.
