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As a pc support tech by trade I can tell you today's drives are criminally crap.
They are a unthinkable place to put anything you hold dear.
Back them up every night and if possible backup the backups.
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And backup the backups of the backups. At least get yourself a Blue Ray drive that will hold 25GB on a single disc and burn your data to a set of BR discs.
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Cornelius Henning wrote: get yourself a Blue Ray drive that will hold 25GB on a single disc and burn your data to a set of BR discs.
Thanks, Brother Cornelius, please respond by private e-mail to this message with your credit card information, and a link to which on-line store you would like me to purchase said item with.
yours, Bill
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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My most sincere apologies! I did not take into account that a Blue Ray drive is so exorbitantly expensive! 
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Bill,
Can you pull the HDD out of the USB enclosure and place the HDD directly in a computer to see if it is visible in the BIOS?
If you do this, can see the HDD in the BIOS but Windows says it is not formatted, get the following.
Download Parted Magic (about USD$10.00), boot from the disk and see if you can mount it directly from the Linux based desktop. If this fails, then open the Terminal and run Testdisk.
If you get this far, search for a tutorial on line about using this to rescue data/fix the partition. If you can't find it, give me a yell and I will find where I put this link.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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Brother Michael, thanks very much for this very practical response !
For unknown reasons (possibly a teaser designed to lull me back into somnolence while the demons prepare an even greater misfortune), said WD hard-drive has re-appeared in the Bios after many reboots. I am now running chkdsk with options /f /r /x ... I see it's already fixed a few clusters, but it will take an eternity to complete the job.
cheers, Bill
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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I have a seemingly dead 2TB USB drive, coincidentally also a WD drive.
I will try to mount the drive directly and see if I can salvage it.
Thanks for the information Michael.
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you. – Buddha
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You sure they're not just encrypted?
With full installs of 8.1, MS decided that everything should be encrypted. If you did a system backup to the drive, I wouldn't be shocked to find MS decided to encrypt it too.. for your data safety, of course. I don't know if their encryption goes so far as the partition table or not. Also, if it was a USB drive, it might have decided you asked it to wipe the drive and use it as a bootable recovery drive.. and that certainly would be encrypted if the original install was.
If the drive shows up under Linux, you may need to blast a few MB of zeros over the front if it before you can recreate the partition table. I've had to recover a few hard drives that way over the years. Windows is way too trusting of whatever garbage data is on the disk and can get terminally confused.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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patbob wrote: You sure they're not just encrypted?
Yes I used to use it to play movies on my TV - which will not accept an encrypted drive - and then after a severe thunder storm, when I wasn't home to disconnect it, it failed.
Unfortunately, I also used it to back up other things, which are now beyond my ability to access. 
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you. – Buddha
modified 4-Jun-15 14:01pm.
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If I may be so bold to suggest forget buying Parted Magic and use the http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/. Follow the instructions on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery. DO NOT try and fix the failing drive as you will reduce your chances of success. The data recovery page will have you make an image of the failing drive. The more errors on the drive the longer the image will take. Even something as small as a 2TB drive can take weeks to image. From there you can work on the image.
Glenn
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BillWoodruff wrote: it appears with a red content-utilized bar rather than the usual blue ... signifying, I guess, "wounded."
Doesn't that just mean it's running low on space?
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Do you think I can understand plausible, rational, explanations at a time like this ? I'd say my current mental state must be (I guess) like that of many newcomers on QA.
cheers, Bill
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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Sorry to hear that - it's horrible when it happens.
Going forward if you have the spare cash you may want to consider some sort of cloud online backup.
I recently bought 1 terabyte of dropbox storage for 79Ggbp for one year together with a "restore any file to any point in the year" service for 29gbp.
It's not a huge outlay when you consider the amount of time and effort backups and storing and retrieving those backups from a safe location takes.
(I will still be taking images every 6 months for my own peace of mind)
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Thanks, Guy, I have been thinking about purchasing some "cloud-space," and, since I've used DropBox for years now, considered DropBox.
What holds me back, however, is the thought of how long it would take me to upload 900+ gigs of stuff, given that my internet connection here (Thailand) is a relatively slow ADSL, and I am too cheap to pay a lot for a faster connection.
cheers, Bill
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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Good point - it will take a while to upload the data.
It took me around four evenings(24hrs) to upload 40Gb of data on a 20mbps line - it's difficult to say whether it is the number of files or size of files which slows things down(although intuitively one might think it is size that matters it's not always the case when copying data.)
I did my research before buying the space and Dropbox came out cheaper than google and Amazon by a long shot.
I hope you manage to recover all if not some of your data.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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BillWoodruff wrote: What holds me back, however, is the thought of how long it would take me to upload 900+ gigs of stuff, given that my internet connection here (Thailand) is a relatively slow ADSL, and I am too cheap to pay a lot for a faster connection.
Relax Bill. When you are retired you have nothing in more abundance than time. 
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you. – Buddha
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Not as good as off premises backup, but I use the following.
(1) PC with two drives in a Windows ReFS RAID 1.
(2) All computers back up to the RAID.
(3) RAID backed up to a portable drive kept in Fire Safe.
Why ReFS RAID 1:
If a drive dies, then remaining drive is a duplicate.
Either drive can be physically removed and plugged into another Windows 8+ PC for read if necessary.
Decent performance. Free with Windows 8 or newer.
The only maintenance is the occasional backup to drive in Fire Safe.
Simple, no membership fee, yep it's not perfect but it's good enough for our family use.
modified 4-Jun-15 11:26am.
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This is very similar to what I'm in the process of building at my house.. While I have cloud storage and fast enough internet that I could probably get my entire household backup set online within a month.. The issue is my connection is data capped.. And to bump my data cap up just to accommodate my online storage would quickly become prohibitively expensive.. So for the time being, the critical and/or "sentimentally important" stuff still comes in under 200GB and I have been incrementally moving it to online storage. My GoPro videos and music collection are scattered amongst multiple machines and multiple 500GB USB drives.. My movies, app installs archive, wife's Mac backups, and other non critical stuff are on a single 2TB on my HTPC just iching to fry as my 1 year warranty is about to expire.
Unfortunately, the old PC I was going to dedicate as the RAID backup box, started to flake out. So might have to find some bare metal box on ebay and build a new one.
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Thank you for the timely warning, Bill. It's been too long since I've done a full backup. Tonight is the night! Totally sympathize with you. 
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softwear
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Does it get hard after you wear it?
You have just been Sharapova'd.
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Only if you wear it out...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Beats the heck out of hardwear.
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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Why? In some situation a good suit of armor can save your life.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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To say it with a movie quote:
Put them in the "Iron Maiden".
EXCELLENT! [air guitar]
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