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My Passport USB drive may be hosed

alejack12001

alejack12001

Experienced Member
Joined
Jul 26, 2020
Messages
428
Location
Fredericksburg, VA
I have a WD My Passport USB 3.0 external hard drive that was used to store data, papers, documents, and pictures. Over time, I moved these files to a 4-TB hard drive that was formatted under Ubuntu Linux as a mirror RAID (two 4-TB drives mirrored). I had a lot of problems with the newer Ubuntu Linux especially since Ubuntu went to Jimmy Jam Version 22.04. LTS.

I copied the files from the Linux drive to the Passport drive. The Passport was formatted as Ext-DOS, which was 1.8-TB in size (i.e, 2-TB when purchased some years ago). When all the files were copied over the drive was early full with about 66-GB of remaining space. I have since changed the machine from Linux back to Windows 7 and formatted the two 4-TB drives to NTFS as a mirror RAID

I have tried to copy the files back to the NTFS RAID drives from the Passport and I keep seeing I/O errors, data not found, not accessible, or not available. I checked the web and found that I could use chkdsk h: /f/r/x as a means to correct he passport drive on a Windows 10 machine. The program ran and began to show data unrecoverable segments in the hundreds with only about 6000 segments checked and well over 1.5 million segments to be scanned. According to the chkdsk calculation, the whole process would take some 68 hours to complete. I figure that something from the Linux copy has corrupted my Ext-DOS FAT on the passport.

I also acquired a WD utility program to look at the passport, however, that turned out to be ineffective. I don’t want to format it as I don’t believe that Recuva could recover anything, if tried. So, I am seeking help from the forum with suggestions from experts. I don’t want to see the loss of this data. What can be done to save it?
 
About three weeks ago, I received a call from a distant in-law relative. Apparently, they'd been stashing all of their stuff on a Passport and deleting it from their laptop to make space. All of the sudden, the Passport quit responding and they had several tens of GB inaccessible. A local outfit took a look and quoted them about $1K to recover the information. I told them to take the firm up on the offer. No way was I going to get involved in this. I did lecture them on storing their important data in more than one place, even if it's on several USB pen drives kept offsite. I was asked about cloud storage. I told them that as one of their backups, it wasn't bad, but as their only backup, probably not a good idea.
 
Chuck(G): Sorry, I just saw you message. Disk Drill worked for me. I costs about $89.00. It took about 2.5 days to scan the entire drive. I guess it found multiple formats resulting in 19.2 TB for all the formats. However, it did allow the user to select the format desired for recovery. The recovery process requires a drive of equal size. In my case, I was using an HP 8600 workstation with an internal 2-TB drive that would recover the files. USB connection was USB 2.0 not so the time was extended as I pointed out. Disk drill recovered 1.8 TB of data from the drive. The recovered files were whole not partials.

My objective, now, is to find a western digital utility that would let me do a low level format that would completely erase the My Passport drive so multiple formats may not reside on that drive.
 
In any case, for me it was in-laws (cousin) located clear across the country. Drive apparently wouldn't even mount. No way was I going to get involved in that one. You know, one of those "Chuck knows all about computers...." conversations. Besides, the best way to make someone change their habits (in this case, back up to more than one place) is to make a lasting impression.
Aren't I terrible? :)
 
alejack12001 said:
I figure that something from the Linux copy has corrupted my Ext-DOS FAT on the passport.
Click to expand...

I think you mean ExFAT, no such thing as Ext-DOS.

You made three mistakes. Your first mistake was using ExFAT on a 4 TB drive, the second was using an ExFAT partition on Linux and the third was trusting ExFAT with important data.

Despite ExFAT having the ability to format huge partitions in the exabyte range, it is not at all fault tolerant, unlike NTFS. ExFAT has no journal, or other advanced means of keeping data integrity. It has most of the same issues FAT32 has, including one more of not having very good Linux compatibility.

ExFAT is still patented by Microsoft, despite them having opened the standard in 2019. An ExFAT driver was integrated into kernel 5.4, and a later bugfixed version in 5.7. Before those kernels, a kernel module driver was required, which opens up all sorts of potential issues with data integrity.

If you plan on using external data storage on large drives in the future, you need to not use ExFAT again. If you want cross platform compatibility, use NTFS. If you only plan on Linux, use EXT4.
 
Chuck(G) said:
In any case, for me it was in-laws (cousin) located clear across the country. Drive apparently wouldn't even mount. No way was I going to get involved in that one. You know, one of those "Chuck knows all about computers...." conversations. Besides, the best way to make someone change their habits (in this case, back up to more than one place) is to make a lasting impression.
Aren't I terrible? :)
Click to expand...
GiGaBiTe said:
I think you mean ExFAT, no such thing as Ext-DOS.

You made three mistakes. Your first mistake was using ExFAT on a 4 TB drive, the second was using an ExFAT partition on Linux and the third was trusting ExFAT with important data.

Despite ExFAT having the ability to format huge partitions in the exabyte range, it is not at all fault tolerant, unlike NTFS. ExFAT has no journal, or other advanced means of keeping data integrity. It has most of the same issues FAT32 has, including one more of not having very good Linux compatibility.

ExFAT is still patented by Microsoft, despite them having opened the standard in 2019. An ExFAT driver was integrated into kernel 5.4, and a later bugfixed version in 5.7. Before those kernels, a kernel module driver was required, which opens up all sorts of potential issues with data integrity.

If you plan on using external data storage on large drives in the future, you need to not use ExFAT again. If you want cross platform compatibility, use NTFS. If you only plan on Linux, use EXT4.
Click to expand...
Chuck(G): No, I would say your smart in keeping your abilities from being exploited. I have a friend who's sister kept bugging me to fix her machine every Thanksgiving we came to her home. She would let the kids play online games and get a ton of adware and sometimes malware, then her husband couldn't use the machine for his business. I finely told her to use this machine for the kids and get another for her husbands business. I think that worked since I haven't heard from her in a while.

GiGaBiTe: Thank you, Your right I made some errors in my post. Of course, I am running multiple versions and different operating systems at the same time on different types of machines. So, you might say that I have a tendency to get somewhat confused. I shall be much more aware of my next post. I can say that Disk Drill solved my experience with the data that I thought I lost on the portable drive.

​

 
I hope you verified the data that Disk Drill returned. My experience is that some of the data recovery programs will cheerfully provide complete gibberish in a successful recovery.
 
Yes, I know. I did verify the files, however, it took about 10 days since I have 1.6 TB of files. You get a little numb after a while and it appears everything was there.
 
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