I’ve had a Western Digital MyBook 1TB hard drive for a little over 2 years now. I’ve loved it, it’s been great for backup for Time Machine and for a scratch space for testing zippyRippy and ZippyConverter. However, on Thursday the drive went bust. As I put it in my USB port a warning came up for me telling me the drive cannot be repaired and it will mount as read-only. This wasn’t such a bad thing but I ran Disk Utility and got an error “Invalid sibling link” or something like that.Upon realizing this was getting serious I decided to blow the dust off my copy of DiskWarrior. The DVD drive in my computer is having some issues so I had to run DiskWarrior from my startup disk. It churned and churned and finally after about 20 minutes it came back and said that there wasn’t enough memory to rebuild the directory, error 2154. Scratching my head in confusion I googled to find out what the hell that was all about. It turns out that if you don’t have enough RAM DiskWarrior will stop trying to rebuild the directory, it seems that even trying to page virtual memory wasn’t enough for it either. If DiskWarrior won’t repair the disk, I don’t know where to turn.I had some updated other utilities I thought I’d try such as Drive Genius, which seems to basically just rum the built in fsck or fsck_hfs command and that failed. Used Tech Tool Pro 5 and that wouldn’t rebuild it either. Nothing I could find would rebuild the catalog B tree on this drive.I was forced to reformat the drive, making sure to get off what was important but as I was reformatting the idea struck me. If I just do a “ho hum” format then it might be easy to use a data recovery tool to retrieve the data. I settled on Data Rescue 3 which will attempt to retrieve the deleted files from the drive. It’s churning on it now but will take 96 hours to get the information from the drive before it’ll restore the files.Guess it’s another project idea, but on the flip side, this was an error that there was no coming back from in an easy way if the heavy hitters of disk utilities can’t fix that error.UPDATE !: 1/26/10 1:43am ET. 25 hours have elapsed and I’m waiting for Data Rescue 3 to finish seeing what was on the drive, it’s processed almost 2 billion blocks and found over 6 million files. I don’t know the result of what files it found, as long as I can recover my Doctor Who seasons I’m a happy camper. If not, no big woop, I’m sure I can get them again.
