Hi guys!
Hoping some of y'all can illuminate this situation for me... currently rather despairing!
I'll try and keep this brief, but it's not in my nature! So thanks in advance for any help.
Okay basically my 1TB WD Passport has been acting up for ages now. It's formatted in NTFS as i primarily use it on OS X, but i do have a bootcamp partition and MacDrive installed. It was like 97% full, sluggish as hell and on it's last legs. Being a total cretin, i never got round to buying that replacement drive, so most of the files aren't backed up. I know i should have backed up my back up... but i kept putting it off... and no thanks to the shoddy WD craftsmanship and some terrible USB connectors and switching back from Windows to OS X so frequently i totally brought this on myself. Not all the files are all that important... but there's enough of them that i won't go down without a fight!
Anyway, a bit of background info for those interested... I was trying to fix some issues i was having with it not indexing correctly (which i was briefly documenting in this annotated imgur album). That was earlier today. It was unbearably slow in 10.9.2, folders would take minutes to open, if at all. I tried to copy a >500mb .avi file off the drive and it took nearly ten minutes to copy before indefinitely hanging at 386mb and i had to stop the transfer.
I was curious about how the drive would react in Windows. While it was still slow, it was noticeably faster at opening the folders, so i tried copying off a file in the windows partition and this proved to be the nail in the coffin. Explorer crashed and upon rebooting i was greeted with the message 'disk structure is corrupted and unreadable'. PANIC. At least before my files were mostly visible and almost within my grasp... I read on here that CHKDSK could potentially sort this out, but because it's formatted in NTFS, I don't think there's much i can do to save it through the windows partition.
Booted into OS X and unlike before, the drive doesn't appear at all, not on the desktop nor in disk utility. It does appear in the drop down menu in Disk Warrior, but comes with the ominous message that "Directory cannot be rebuilt due to disk hardware failure (-36, 2747)"... So that's that.
I dare not touch it any more for fear that i'll corrupt the data further. After reading some posts here about a clicking sound, i put my ear to it and it does seem like there's a very faint and quiet, bassy thud that happens upon each rotation of the platter. However i can't say that this only appeared today. I only noticed it because i was actively listening for it, it's very quiet and i never noticed it before. While the drive was acting up and dying for weeks prior, this is a low point.
Sorry if all this information is mostly unnecessary, so for those who don't want to read all that, here's where i'm looking for some advice... I'm wondering...
a) Is it even salvageable at this point? Screw the drive, i just want my files, and unfortunately there's a lot of them. In my layman's assessment, the data directory/partition/files have become deeply corrupted, would this even allow for data recovery? Has my data been mangled, or is it more a situation of a safe with a lost combination, but the contents are still (mostly) intact?
b) If so, is there anything i can personally do to reclaim some of my data if it's not even appearing on my desktop or anything? I'm skeptical of all this software offering quick solutions. Especially as Disk Warrior is saying it's a lost cause, when its been a very reliable program in somewhat similar situations in the past. But if people here think a certain program might do the trick, then i'm open to the possibility.
c) Finally, as ide from that faint bassy thud i hear, the drive seems to be in good condition physically, never dropped or anything. I expect most people go to data recovery specialists in cases of extreme physical damage, which i don't believe to be the case. So is taking it to recovery specialists my best bet? Could they even do anything? I've seen some eye watering figures being thrown around on these forums for data recovery, so if that's my only glimmer of hope in getting the majority of my data back then i'm really going to have to weigh up whether the data is worth the cost... gulp.
Thanks for reading (!) and I know it's all speculation when diagnosing things like this online, but i'd greatly appreciate any and all of your feedback. I hope someone can offer some insight into this situation!
Oh and feel free to tell my what a dingus i am for not backing up more often. I need to hear it.
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