Western Digital External Woes

[Twowildman21]

So I have been using a Western Digital External Hard Drive for a about 3 months, and had no problems. Just the other day the usb port broke off the circuit board causing me to have no way of plugging it in. So I went and bought a Rosewill enclosure and put the hard drive in, suddenly it cannot be read by my mac, and I always get an error saying this disc cannot be read. Oddly, this never happened before, even right before the usb port broke off. I am using Data Recovery 3 to see if I can get any files off. Any know any ideas of why this is happening and any possible fixes?

EDIT: Forgot to include that the hard drive was able to be seen in Disk Utility as well as Disk Warrior, but in disk warrior it said that the "directory could not be rebuilt the size of this standard disk is unsupported"

 

[ljonesj]

usb enclosure may not support the size of the drive i know some that dont like the 3tb drives try to find one that supports your hd

 

[Twowildman21]

usb enclosure may not support the size of the drive i know some that dont like the 3tb drives try to find one that supports your hd

The enclosure says it supports up to 2tb drives and mine is a 2tb.

 

[ljonesj]

might be the enclosure is bad i ve had that happen a few times

 

[praktical]

Bad Enclosure

might be the enclosure is bad i ve had that happen a few times

true word on that. I would rather think the enclosure is bad than the HDD. Now if you were using Seagate I would reconsider.
Just me though...I tend to dislike Seagate drives.

 

[Twowildman21]

true word on that. I would rather think the enclosure is bad than the HDD. Now if you were using Seagate I would reconsider.
Just me though...I tend to dislike Seagate drives.

Its a Western Digital drive, although that's not much better then seagate. I am going to try another enclosure and see what happens

 

[rasto]

Yes, some enclosure are pretty crappy. Some even don't last more than few months as they're made for price.

Try to get better brand Belkin for example.

It's all made in China, difference is in parts and engineering put into them.

 

[severe]

I've got a similar problem to the one here.

I'm also using a 2TB Western Digital external drive, that had been removed from its enclosure because it'd gone bad.

At any rate, I'm using a USB docking hub, which seems to be working fine with my other drives. It also supports 2TB drives. However when I plug this drive in it doesn't mount, but it does show up in Disk Utility.

Disk Warrior is giving me the "directory could not be rebuilt, the size of this standard disk is unsupported" dialogue.

Pretty much an identical issue.

Has anyone had and resolved a similar issue?

For what it's worth, I'd recently purchased a Mac Mini with Mountain Lion, coming from an older Mac Pro with Lion installed.


Thanks for any help.

 

[mcfunk]

Same issue here

Was anyone able to resolve this issue? I'm having the exact same problem - 2TB WD external hard drive enclosure crapped out, put it in a new enclosure. Hard drive spins and sounds fine in the enclosure, but Mac won't recognize it and Disk Warrior is giving the same error cited above.

 

[CWallace]

WD might be using some proprietary boot sector information that their enclosures translate so Mac / PC can read it?

 

[priitv8]

WD might be using some proprietary boot sector information...

they use Advanced Format drives that may require special sector alignment.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3885

 

[Fishrrman]

[[ they use Advanced Format drives that may require special sector alignment.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3885 ]]

One more reason why the ONLY drives I buy are "bare drives" that I either put into an enclosure myself, or just "use bare" with a USB3/SATA docking station.

I do have a Seagate external firewire drive I use for backups, but it wasn't bought by me...

The best course of action with external drives is to
1. Buy the drive
2. Buy an enclosure or USB/SATA dock
3. Put it together yourself.

 

[opinio]

Did all those having trouble with the drives try re-partitioning the drive. I have found swapping drives between enclosures sometimes requires a format or re-partition under the new controller for the drive to be properly recognised.

 

[tmcdanel]

Sabrent usb 3 dock and Diskwarrior 4.4

Quote:
Originally Posted by CWallace View Post
WD might be using some proprietary boot sector information...

Then priitv8 spouted:
they use Advanced Format drives that may require special sector alignment.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3885

Same problem as everyone else. I suspect Diskwarrior 4.4 because the original enclosure read nothing, now the dock reads but apparently will not return a valid directory. I am guessing that because there has been nothing since September Diskwarrior did not solve the problem.

Is there other drive recover software that might succeed?

 

[danny_w]

I thought I read a while back that WD uses hardware encryption on their drives now, which means that nothing else is going to read them. Could this be the problem>