Help! Harddrive partition vanished after checkdisk!

Hi all,

I have an external harddrive (USB, 1TB Western digital crap), and it started to show corrupted files.
So I did a scandisk on it, but over USB2.0 speeds are at 8MB/s for 1TB, that's a long time!
So I got tired of it, and unplugged the drive (scandisk would not respond, and vanished after my computer entered into sleep mode); and thus I thought I get the drive out of the USB case, and plug it in my SATA port.

THe drive is recognized, speeds around 97MB/s (much better), but the partition seems to be lost!

I have found software that could do a scandisk on the un-partitioned drive, and it found several problems, but I don't know how to regain my data/partition again!

The drive probably still has all the files on it! It just needs a rewrite of the TOC or something I presume!

Any soft out there that can do the job (preferably free)?

thanks!

ProDigit said:

I have found software that could do a scandisk on the un-partitioned drive, and it found several problems, but I don't know how to regain my data/partition again!

Hmm that may have been a mistake, to mess with the drive before attempting recovery. Whatever you do after losing a drive, you don't want to WRITE to it again.

I have Active@ Partition Recovery myself, but I don't know that they have a free version, sorry. Others here will know; I've just never had much luck with freeware tools.

I already have downloaded testdisk, but it does not find my drive,
in fact, it only finds my mounted ISO drive, not even my C or D drive.

The broken drive does not have a drive letter assigned yet.

I know there's some software out there that can recover files, but I don't want to end up with hundreds of text files on my drive and then sorting out which file had which file name...

It's my backup drive, I only had it for a year, and barely used it...
It's number 5 of the 5 WD drives that failed me within 2 years.

Never had issues with Toshiba, or seagate.
Western Digital and Maxtor are brands that have given me constant trouble!

I've tried minitool partition wizard, getdataback for NTFS, EASEUS partition recovery, all without result.

I'm trying now the demo of active@partition recovery; but at <100 MB/s scanning a 1TB drive is going to take some time...