I have a WDBU6Y0020BBK external hard disk which recently died for no apparent reason. It was making no strange noises, had no reported SMART issues last time I checked, and wasn't even that old. Windows Disk Manager can see the disk but reports it as missing GPT so my first thought was maybe it just somehow got the first part corrupted and so all the data was hidden. I didn't want to just create a new GPT and partitions so tried to see if I could restore the old one, or skip it and use some tools that could go straight to the data. I tried the following tools:
- Acronis Disk Director
- R-Studio
- Stellar Data Recovery
- EaseUS DRS
- WD Dashboard
- WD Drive Utilities
Some of them couldn't see the disk, and others just reported no problems. Deep scans finished basically instantly and some more digging revealed the true problem - the disk is reporting that it has 0 sectors. I don't know how that happened, but it means that the tools that can see it quite happily scan all 0 bytes they know about, report 0 issues in those 0 bytes, and declare the disk good.
Are there any other tools (or advanced features in the ones I listed, I didn't get deep in to any of them) to try and reset the sector count, or just outright lie to Windows and have it request sectors seemingly out of bounds? Or is this indicative of a deeper issue with a different solution? Although I did this on Windows, and the main partition is NTFS, I have enough access and experience to Linux to be able to use that if there are more appropriate tools there.
To make matters worse, my first thought was just plug the drive in directly, but it is one of the ones with a USB port directly on the control board, instead of a USB-SATA adapter.
What other information/tools output would be useful to report?
