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Hi Guys,

i would like some help here as i have an external hard drive that is not picked up by the OS and when i go to device manager it says it needs to initialize the disk so i assume the MBR is missing or corrupted.

i need this Data and I have tried Easy Recovery Professional and it doesn’t seem to work.

it is a Seagate 2.5" 500GB hard drive but it is displaying as a 2TB hard drive in the Data recovery programme which is concerning.

i am now using a programme called Find and Mount to see if it works (it still picks up as a 2TB Hard drive)

does anyone have any suggestions on what software would be the best to use or how i can recover the data?

43 Spice ups
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I’ve had exceptionally good luck with SpinRite GRC | SpinRite 5.0 to 6.0   %uFEFF

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If it’s business critical, don’t mess about with it - send it to data recovery.

Otherwise, I’ve had good results with Zero Assumption Recovery .

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Pandora recovery is a great tool, which I have had great success with. It might not be a bad idea to create an ISO of the drive before going too much further, just so if, in the process of trying to restore the data, something more happens and the data is wiped.

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I’d hook it up to a Linux pc if you have one and see if you can get to the data. Often when I worked break/fix shops my Linux machine saved me hours of “recovery” time. I used standard Ubuntu but any should work if you have access to them. heck you could even download the live run usb/cd and try from there. Just my 2 cents.

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Also if its reading 2tb instead of 500gb it could be the firmware has shot craps so maybe look for the drives firmware online and after you have secured the data initialize, reformat, and flash the firmware. though my thought on drives with issues is to back up all the data I can and hit it with a sledge hammer because typically they are toast shortly there after.

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If the data is critical you would be better off sending it out. Otherwise give TestDisk a try. It has worked well for me on numerous occasions.

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I like spinrite and EaseUSData Revory.

I’ve had good results with them over the years. Been using spinrite since the early 90’s think.

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I agree with Natiku that booting up the computer with a Linux Live CD, there is a chance you could browser the folder structure on the HDD and pull off some files. I’ve never used myself, But I’ve heard Spinrite is good at recovering data like Phil6024 said.

This article might help as well: How to Recover Data When Your Hard Drive Goes Belly Up | Lifehacker

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Bro… Hirams Boot CD. http://www.hirensbootcd.org/ use the linux tool to boot into an linux OS and extract the data best you can. I sometimes wrap a drive in cellophane and throw it in the freezer for a few hours first. Sounds weird, but i’ve been saving things proprietary data to baby pics.

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Lots of good suggestions above! I’ll throw in a good word for backups - online (cloud) or manual good old make a duplicate somewhere.

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Hirens boot CD has recovery tools that I have used several times. Hope this helps.

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I use Hirens A LOT!

This is just one thing you can do with it.

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I’d check the MBR first with Paragons Partition Manager .

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First thing I would do is disassemble the enclosure and connect the HDD directly to a sata controller.

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SpinRite ftw. Thing works miracles.

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Spin Rite, most forensics stuff like Access Data FTK, Paraben, or EnCase.

Also you can go to the disk manufacturers websites for recovery tools. They are free.

I found Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital all had free software when I was recovering external drives for friends that crashed on them. Look for them on their support and download areas on their sites.

Also the freezer bag trick. You can put an old spindle hard drive in a freezer when it is clicking or pinging itself to death. It gives you 10 to 15 minutes of run time to move data per session.

Any good external USB to SATA and USB to IDE kit is usually around $30 on tiger direct or newegg. Most of the time the OS gets corrupt, and just hooking the drive up externally and scanning it recovers the data quickly. You may need to take ownership of the files to move them, but that is easy as long as you have admin or root rights to the OS that you hook the external drive to.

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My go to data recovery software is Data Rescue from Prosoft Engineering.

They offer a free trail.

https://www.prosofteng.com/datarescue4/

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I have had success with SpinRite and TestDisk as well.

If it needs to go out, Gillware is great.

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In my experiences, SpinRite is overrated. It hasn’t been updated in nearly 10 years, and has a divide by 0 error that tends to crop up with most new 4k sector hard drives and modern motherboards. Drive controllers and data write methods have improved significantly since it was last updated. I haven’t dared test it on a UEFI based board, since it requires BIOS level interaction.

I keep LSoft’s Active Data Recovery current, along with a copy of Partition Guru Pro, since it was one of the first tools I found that would do GPT recovery (out of dozens tested at the time). I also keep a usb drive interface for old IDE drives, and an e-sata/usb dual SATA hdd dock.

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