Mirror Edition Hard drive recovery.

[dafoe]

I have an old 2TB Western Digital Hard Mirror Edition drive. It's a big ugly brick that takes up way too much space. I only bought it because it was a really good deal for 2TB at the time. Anyway, it started acting up years ago. I would have to unplug it and plug it back in several times before it would boot. Eventually it stopped booting. It just powers on and I get a flashing blue light. PC does not recognize it at all. Not in Device Manager either.

The drive can be used as a RAID array, but I never did. I wanted the full 2tb capacity. It laid around broken for years. Last week I took it apart and connected one of the drives through an esata station and ran it through RecoverMyFiles. Showed lots of "lost" files. Thousands of pictures. Some I could click on in the preview windows and see. Others were a garbled mess. Finished the session in about two days. Saved it. Reloaded the session and suddenly the original file system seemed to be somewhat intact. But when I tried to recover anything I got an error: "list index out of bounds". I think I know how to fix that. I'm working on drive number two right now. It will be finished tomorrow.

My question is there any program that will allow me to hook up both drives internally and recover this mess? I'm not familiar with this model. Are the two drives interdependent? It's not storing part of the file on one hard drive and another part of the same file on the other is it? When it worked the drive just acted as if it was one 2TB hard drive. So is that an issue? It seems like many of the photos from the same project on drive A are on drive B as well. But that's pure speculation I'm lost. I just want to figure out what is on the drives. I want to make sure there is nothing irreplaceable before I reformat them.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Nelson37]

Describe the individual drives, 1TB or 2TB each? Describe the connection type to the PC.

Likely it uses some non-standard software that will make an internal connection with access to data difficult. Might need a Linux boot disk, many of these devices use a Linux system. Might need a Western Digital utility.

Plug em in internally, delete partitions, re-create, and format, and should be good to go. Problem was most likely internal circuitry in the box and not the drives themselves. This is why I avoid such proprietary boxes. Long-term reliability is an issue.

[jagabo]

Never use drive recovery software that writes to the drive being recovered. Use software that copies from the bad drive to another drive.

[Bernix]

It usually get warning before restoring, that is highly not recommended to restore to same drive.

[dafoe]

Thanks for the replies.

@Nelson

The unit contains two 1TB green drives. They connect to the same controller which then connects to the PC via USB 2.0. would love to reformat them. As it turns out they have a small bit of irreplaceable data on them.

@jagabo and Bernix. No worries, I know not to save data from a bad drive to the same drive. Sorry if I was unclear.

Update: I finished the second drive with the same results. I then realized that RecoverMyFiles had a "RAID" option, so I connected both drives internally and set up a scan. It was much faster and finished in just a day. The file tree seemed to be much more intact. New problem. Now it is showing several copies of files where there should be only one copy. So I picked an .iso and saved all 6 copies. Only two would play and they were both corrupted and not the correct file. Everything I have recovered is corrupted. This is insane and I can't find anything in google for a non mirrored Mirror Edition.

If anybody has any suggestions I would really appreciate it. I'm out of ideas.

[raffriff42]

>The drive can be used as a RAID array, but I never did. I wanted the full 2tb capacity.

Okay so FYI you have a RAID 0 (striped) setup.

>RecoverMyFiles had a "RAID" option, so I connected both drives internally and set up a scan...
>Now it is showing several copies of files where there should be only one copy.

The RAID parameters are incorrect somehow.

http://www.recovermyfiles.com/data-recovery-help/raid-recovery.php
>Is it a hardware or software RAID? (A hardware RAID usually has a separate RAID controller card);

You probably have hardware RAID (a RAID controller card in the drive enclosure).
This may mean you need to put the drives back in their original locations, or maybe not - if you can find the correct RAID parameters.
(and if WD is not doing a proprietary low-level disk format)

>13.4.1 Hardware RAID
>Click on the "Find Layout" button to find a suggested configuration.

Good luck... if "Find Layout" does not work, you need to use WD's software, see below

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2331589,00.asp
>The drive comes with two other WD utilities: WD Drive Manager gives you a health report, indicating
>the RAID status, whether a drive has failed, and if the array is rebuilding itself after a failure.

This is the most likely solution IMHO. Get the drives back in the original enclosure and use the WD software.

[Nelson37]

This is why I don't like RAID. If using a custom controller, you are held captive to that controller, if it fails, you are screwed. It is possible, but by no means certain, that a second, IDENTICAL controller, no updates, no changes, IDENTICAL, might, maybe, be able to successfully read the drives.

A utility I have used with great success is GetDataBack, but I do not know if it deals with RAID. It has recovered data from drives that nothing else would touch.

Striped drives give good read performance boost, but when the system goes bad, they are a nightmare from hell. Probability of failure is multiplied by two drives and one custom controller.