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My WD3200BUCT (320 GB HDD) stopped working. It had Win 7 (64 bit) installed. The problem at hand is that there is still some important data on it that I would like to recover. When I plug it into my machine running Ubuntu 14.04 via USB 2.0, the system log shows the following: system log

When I run Testdisk, it shows the following: Testdisk

When I select "Analyze" on that 512 B WD HDD, following information comes up: Testdisk "Analyze"

In "Advanced" mode it states the following: Testdisk "Advanced"

I was unable to retrieve any data.

I also tried to retrieve the data with Recuva on a Windows machine, the HDD was recognized, everything was OK with the drivers, but the HDD capacity was 512 B again and it was not possible to repair or create any partitions,and recovering data was also impossible.

What could be the issue with this HDD? Is there any chance to recover my important data from it?

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  • 1
    How was the drive formatted?
    – JMY1000
    Commented Dec 5, 2017 at 9:33
  • 1
    Was it in an enclosure - did that enclosure change?
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Dec 5, 2017 at 9:38
  • So me background on this: Old old PC style drive like this has 512 byte sectors. This is fine and that was fine. However 512 byte sectors limits the wize to max 2TiB when using MBR. So many enclosure 'helpfully' translate this into 4K sector for the USB side. If you put a 512k sector disk with 512 numbers in such an enclosure then sector numbers will be messed up (and probably end in a number about 8x larger then the disk now thinks it has sectors).
    – Hennes
    Commented Dec 5, 2017 at 14:02
  • If that is the case booting in the original setup (from something else, like @davidgo's mention f an USB pendrive) will solve that. As will putting in directly on the ATA bus of the other computer. Since this is SATA drive it will fit to the same connectors as your other disks.
    – Hennes
    Commented Dec 5, 2017 at 14:04

1 Answer 1

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The WD3200BUCT is an internal hard disk - the USB interface is most likely messing with it's geometry. Put it into a computer and then boot from a USB key (you might need to run Testdisk again) and pull off your data.

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  • Did exactly what you advised me to do. Booted Linux Mint 18.3 from a USB key on a computer with the HDD connected via SATA, tried to analyse it with Testdisk. Exactly the same result as described in my initial post.
    – doktormatte
    Commented Dec 12, 2017 at 22:05

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