Enclosure appearing in Disk Utility with selective drives

[technominds]

I have 5 different 3.5 HDD's, two of which are both Western Digital. I have a USB caddy which seems to work fine with all of my HDD's, they show up in disk utility and mount no problem. These WD drives, when plugged into the caddy, don't appear in disk utility, and neither does the caddy when they are plugged in.

Both WD drives used to live in my Mac Pro and I thought they had died when I got the message 'cannot read drive' after a reboot.. so I have removed them to try and recover data from them. There is no clicking sound at all, I'm trying to do all I can to recover the data but I've hit a wall with being able to actually connect these to any machine.

Any help would be welcomed, there is a few things on these drives that I'd love to get back (from in between a backup cycle).

Thanks in advance,

TM

 

[Fishrrman]

Do you by chance have a _different_ Mac you could plug the caddy and WD into?

The idea is to see if the same situation "replicates" on another Mac.

Another thought:
What follows is a "last ditch" attempt, if nothing else works.

- You will need data recovery software like "DataRescue3" or "Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery".
- You will also need one or more "scratch drives" to receive the recovered data.
- Once you have these things, do this next:
- Re-initialize the drive(s) in question into a SINGLE partition. DO NOT choose to "zero out" the data -- just a quick re-initialization
- Once this is done, the drives should become "mountable" on the desktop. Even so, they will appear to be "empty" because they have new directories on them.
- HOWEVER, re-initializing replaces ONLY the directories, and leaves the data that is actually out on the sectors of the drives "untouched".
- You can now mount the drives, and use the data recovery software to "attack" them. The data recovery software will "look around" (essentially, ignore) the new directories, and "go right to the platters" to scavenge and then reconstruct the data files. They will be saved to the "scratch disks".
- You almost certainly will lose most or all file names and folder hierarchies, but the data itself should be "saved". That's routine for data recovery software.

All of the above assumes that the drives are not "physically damaged", i.e., broken drive heads, motors, etc.

The above procedure worked for me with an "un-mountable" partition on a drive that had many mp3 files I wanted to save. I got just about all of them back by doing this.

Again, something to try when nothing else seems to work….