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Hello, I have encountered an unpleasant event. My external hard drive has stopped working. The disc is no longer readable . When I connect the disc to my computer, the system asks me to format it.

There are very important files on the disc.

Does anyone know how to help me?

17 Spice ups
2

You’ll need to try to scrape the disk, use something like easeus data recovery.

I’ve had previous success with that, otherwise you’ll need to remove the disks and put them into an external spindle. I.E Ship the drive to a specialist.

Cheers

RGE.

2 Spice ups
3

it depends on how important the files are. There are firms like OnTrack that can do magic and if recovery is possible, they will do it. Such recovery would not be inexpensive.

I had a raid hiccup and all the disks were unreadable. They got ALL my data back. It was reassuringly expensive.

3 Spice ups
4

May try connecting to a computer running Linux. I haven’t personally, but have had a couple colleagues say they were successful recovering data this way.

Thought it does depend on what corrupted/broke on your hard drive.

1 Spice up
5

I have used EaseUS software, and it worked perfectly one time and restored everything and unable to restore the files the second time on a different external hard drive.

6

If there are important files then it is essential that you have backups.
If you don’t have backups then these are the steps you can take.

  1. If very important data is on the hard drive and you are uncertain about what to do seek local help or use a data recovery company.
  2. Do not write to the disk.
  3. I prefer to work with Linux working from a USB stick and you can adjust these instructions to suit what you want to work with.
  4. Check out the hard drive SMART values and if good make a clone of the hard drive to work on so that you always have the original to go back too,
  5. It is probably just file corruption and on the clone do a “chkdsk” to see if that corrects it. In Linux there is a procedure outlined here: https://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-linux-tips/fix-a-non-working-windows-hard-drive-on-linux/
  6. If the above doesn’t work then use TestDisk followed by photorec. TestDisk restores partitions with the file names and photorec just finds files but if no partition table it will allocate its own file names and to find the ones you want will be a search. TestDisk Download - CGSecurity
7

There are two components to any external drive:

  • The disk itself, where data is stored
  • The controller

If you’re lucky, the controller may have died but the disk could be fine. Search Google for “Hard Drive Encloser” and put your disk in a different caddie to see if you can get the data.

1 Spice up
8

The more you try to get the files of, the less chance of full data recovery. Go to the professionals. Get a quote from a disk recovery company. That will tell you how important the files are - if it is too expensive the files were actually not that important!.

Don’t try to do this yourself until you have the quote. If it is too expensive, then you can try yourself with the software suggested in this thread, but don’t expect to have a go yourself, fail, and then have a recovery company succeed.

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I was advised to take the disc out of the box and connect it directly. But the disc still doesn’t work.

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ea7371a4-5389-4bec-9202-7d39351ffb28-1705410656369.png782×544 255 KB
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Checking it outside the box can only show what you already know. Most probably the hard drive file system is corrupted. Do as I suggested above. If you want to take a risk then do the work on the original.

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I need to make a copy of a damaged disk. Is there any tool for this? I found only HDD Raw Copy Tool on Google.

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Free one is Clonezilla

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To copy a damaged disk, I would boot from a CAINE Live USB or DVD, and run ddrescue-gui:

14

Another small point. Using ANY data recovery software MAY make things worse. It depends on the actual issue. If the drive issue is due to hardware, accessing it may may do more damage.

And whatever you do, don’t installany software on the damaged disk! :slight_smile:

2 Spice ups
15

From the screenshots you have posted it looks like the partition table has been damaged. Running a recovery software through it might show some files to recover. As mentioned DO NOT write anything to that drive or it will destroy any chance of doing any kind of file recovery.

There are many different recovery tools out there and they do not all work the same. If one doesn’t work, try a different one. EasyUS and Recuva are 2 I have used in the past with some success.

You can always send to a recovery specialist to have them try and recover the files. Most are not cheap but it depends how important the files are vs how much you can afford to have them recovered. The specialist have there own recovery software that usually does an amazing job at recovering files.

16

I did manage to solve this problem.

I came across a video tutorial and bought a tool… true, it cost me $97.95, but that’s nothing compared to taking the disc to a technician. I risked losing my files forever. But I can’t afford to pay a lot of money.

The program displayed my RAW drive, which used to be FAT, and started a full scan. It found most of my files and successfully recovered them. Yes, it couldn’t recover all the files, but I was lucky: I recovered the most important ones .

And yes, I will make copies of important files (discs) for the future.

Also, thanks to everyone who tried to help me)

17

Well done you got your files back and learnt about the importance of backups.

What that that paid for software did was to restore the partition table (The task that TestDisk does) and recover files (the task that photorec does). It has a a nice front end so that it is easy to understand. TestDisk and photorec are free. As well as backups I suggested that you can have a practice with TestDisk and Photorec just so that when you really need them you feel confident.

2 Spice ups
18

Give SpinRite a try: GRC | Hard drive data recovery software   GRC | Hard drive data recovery software