A couple years ago I received a WD My Book Studio 1tb for Mac as a gift. I am an amateur video editor, so I have loved the FireWire 800 port. Over Christmas 2011, the drive said that it needed a firmware update. Stupid me allowed it to install said update. In the middle of installing, installation failed. After that I could not get the drive to be recognized by my Mac at all, not in Disk Utility or System Profiler. After searching the Internet, I went ahead and took apart the enclosure. The bare drive can be seen via USB on my Mac, but it sees it as an unformatted drive that needs to be partitioned. I have not erased or formatted in any way, so I think that the data should still be there. How can I get the data off?

I don’t need all 800gb, just about 250 that is irreplaceable. My options currently are a USB sata cable which I own, and a 2010 15″ MBP. Linux options are fine, as are $100 data recovery programs. I just need to know what to do next. Thanks.

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/wd-and-seagate-in-hard-drive-warranty-massacre/027676

Here’s the long survey–a shorter (IT WILL–just scroll down, dudes and dudesses) will follow at the end!! (but it took a long time to figure out):

My WD 2tb – western digital elements 2tb – in case anyone is surfing for keywords on the internet – crapped out after very little use. Not one chance in a million Western Digital is going to back up their product or help you out. I got the blinking white blink of death–a blink every .5 sec. or so, and my computer (desktop) would not recognize that ext. drive anymore.

At first I did not believe that my hard drive had been cracked or ruined, but then I did come to believe that it had been. However, I just couldn’t imagine the money that it would cost to recover my data. I had just paid a lot of money to have my computer repaired. If you absolutely must get your hard drive recovered, shop around if you can. It need not necessarily cost 1000s, though it will cost 100s. Would everyone please stop saying “oh, it was all my photos of my family.” Please give me a break. In my case, it was most of my music, many films I cherish, and, yes, alot of nudity. When I had my computer done over, that involved exposing all kinds of financial information and so on, but if I had to spend 1000s to get my ext. hd. back, and expose my gathered nudity (and Human League videos) that I had not even seen to others, well, that’s a problem. What is it about porn you download but never look at–it becomes the more precious for never having been seen, perhaps, like a relative who died in a war. It took me all that time not to know!! And I still don’t.

One thing we need to be clear on is that Western Digital external hard drives are absolutely bottom of the barrel. I, and anyone who has bought one and wound up like me, knows the deal. I was at my local dealer, that tried to shove all that WD crap out the door as fast as they could a little while back. Just junk offloaded off the back of a truck without even a plank. Such crap they wouldn’t even stock it again, and even WD won’t touch it. Pure garbage that was foisted on consumers. WD is red meat for class action, if you ask me. WD would say, “hey, it’s a competitive market; we need to provide items at the lowest price.” I get that, but when you shove out total crap that the whole world is dissatisfied with, well, it becomes another issue entirely. I have noted that, around me, WD offers a 1, a 1.5, a 2.5, a 3, and so on, but, oh, not a 2. Mm.
Funny, that, but I guess that’s what WD pays the lawyers for. WD loves the fact that there are DIY people out there like Scott b/c they keep WD in business; unofficially, Scott and Carlton are executive VPs of customer service for WD. They don’t get paid, but in a sane world, they would be paid. The store I was at the other night had a WD box taped up and crushed like the garbage it was–how many people and refurbs had it gone through?–and still they wanted a couple hundred. When I opened my own WD, I found odd screws, one pre-stripped, and greasy marked components, as if I’d gotten some leftovers for full price.

I’ve had a handful of external drives in my life–well, only by three brands. About 10 years ago I got one by LaCie, and man, that thing, that thing is a tank. Solid steel, sings like a chainsaw at the toughest knot–unkillable. I could throw that thing into the parking lot–I probably have–and it would not die. That thing has suffered more hard/cold boots than Alaska but it keeps on. They made things better, in those days. I always thought my Hitachi was dodgy, but dodgy didn’t know what dodgy was until it met Western Digital. What astonishing cheap crap. You really know it when you open it up.

The solution I recommend below involves paying yet more companies for the first company’s incompetence–a kind of sick capitalistic parasitism Americans in particular love.

So if you get the blinking white blink of death on a Western Digital 2 TB WD Elements 2TB like me, and you just can’t see your way through to pay WD, already rich from you in the first place, then listen to me:

Carlton/Scott show you how you can use SATA-USB cords for low cost to plug in to your motherboard etc. Sounds good to me, and I bet it works. I was a little worried about it. I couldn’t even get one; I would have had to go to a store called Memory Express (xpress, whatever, it’s a chain–Best Buy or other chains may not stock them where you live–the universal adaptor/uptake thing Carlton talks about may not be available in your area–phone ahead–but if it is, by all means, check it out. Way back on this thread, I think, I heard someone say “I’ve tried everything, rocketfish, it all dosen’t work!!,” or something like that.

Well, I was in a store, and I saw a thing called rocketfish. I did not think it would work, but after I was assured that I could take it back, I bought it.

So HERE is the short version:

1) WD Elements 2tb stops working after brief utility
–light starts blinking white at roughly .5 sec intervals.
2)Aggrieved owner reads up, and reads up, and reads up, on the web
(and is really frankly disappointed by all the dickheads on the web who think they’re funny when they’re not–it’s a long life to live, pals, and you only shorten it by being assholes).
3)Owner gently opens the back of his WD 2tb ext hd. Chickens out, time passes, blah blah. Anyway, it’s incredibly easy to open it up. People kept talking about on the web “is it black??” “is it blue??” “what kind of caviar is it??” Ugh. The case isn’t very sturdy. Just work it a bit with your hands. Press it and work it and loosen it up a bit. Press it; don’t leave it stiff. Once you’ve sensed its malleability (even a stone is malleable), insert a sharp-ish tool btwn the cover and the backing–maybe start at the back, where the lights don’t shine. Once you’ve worked your tool in there, work around a bit. You’ll hit something, so back off and pry a bit. Really, it’s the easiest thing in the world.
4)Don’t worry too much about the rubber or plastic brackets holding the drive in place. Just peel them back and gently remove the entire unit, probably from the back end. By now you can see what junk WD is putting out, and you can even see how easy they’ve made it for their own technicians to get in there and try to deal with their own problems. What scandal. It isn’t too hard to lift it out, just as it wasn’t too hard to go around the seams and lift the backing off.
5)now you are going to have to shell out, unless you do like Scott or Carlton advise above. I just plain chickened out and got the “rocketfish 3.0 3.5 SATA Hard Drive Enclosure” for abt 80$ US. You probably just do need a SATA to USB connector that could cost you much, much less, maybe 25% of the price, at a place such as Memory Xpress or whatever. You could also use what you buy once and return it in perfect order. There’s a degree of honesty about that–WD wouldn’t understand it, but there’s a degree of honesty about it. Even if you do get things working, sooner or later, you will probably need to make up a new enclosure of some kind.
6)Look at the very end of Carltonbale’s video. He remarks that you have to get the four screws off the business end where the plugs go in–this is so. In order to move that ext. hd., you need to take those screws out (remember, lefty loosey, righty tighty), and you should start with the screws nearest the end of the device, b/c those have the least grounding or purchase–loosen those front ones first and then go back to the others that are more wired into the drive.
7)Once you’ve got that off, then all you have to do is slip the freed hard drive into the rocketfish (as I have it) or, if you’re following other instructions, maybe just the sata. The rocketfish provides a sata plugin (just as you would need to buy if you didn’t have one, a sort of …… …. type plug). The rocketfish also has a power cord connector and a usb. You can probably manage the usb from defective external to computer easily enough–using the old defective cord, maybe. You might need an adaptor such as I think Carlton recommends, or others on you-tube do. You do need a usb, a sata, and a power connection. In my case it *was* just a case of a different enclosure, although I thought it was a cracked hard drive.
8)The silly and really annoying part. I’d done all above, but such was my fate that I had Vista. Methusaleh was old when he met Vista. I tried and tried and tried to to get Vista to recognise, or re-recognise, my drives. No go. This is where WD, that I am always complaining about, came in handy. I got an SES driver for my specific ext hd from their site, and things seemed to start to work. In other words, don’t hope on Vista, and don’t hope much on the web–go to WD, where they are supposed to have garbage that supports their garbage and, lo,’ they might.
9)Am I out of the woods? Not a chance. But I am trying to back up whatever I can. Ask me in a couple of days. How much can you back up, anyway? Back up far enough to hit a general? I don’t know. One crucial lesson: when your computer reassigns drive letters, let it. Do not be stuck on old habits; the habits of computers have weapons vastly more advanced than yours. Resist at all costs the temptation to reconfigure as you would like things.

Ok I think I’m done now. Fire away, you tirds, (quoting another brilliant essayist I met online this evening) but don’t do so until you’ve heard the Bloody Hollies first!
ww

I am still unable to access the info on my MyBook.