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Please HELP! External Hard Drive Recovery
Hi guys, I've got an External USB Hard drive (WD Elements 500GB) which has suddenly stopped working.
What do I mean by not working.. well the Disks don't show up in 'My Computer'.. The device IS however showing up as a USB Device. It has 3 partitions: Two FAT32 and 1 NTFS.
So I searched the web for a solution, got messing about in DISK MANAGEMENT. It showed that my HD was online, bit did not show the 3 partitioned drives.. just showed 495GB of free space.
UNFORTUNATELY I tried 'Convert to MBR' , thinking this might help. It didn't. No change. I'm not sure what format the drive was in before, if the formats are compatible or if I just destroyed my access to any data that was previously on the HD.
I went into the DISKPART menu in the Command Prompt and got the disk details:
WD ELEMENTS 1023 USB DEVICE
DISK ID: A5F47B92
TYPE: USB
Status: Online
PATH: 0
TARGET: 0
LUN ID: 0
LOCATION PATH: UNAVAILABLE
Current Ready only state: No
Read-only: No
Boot Disk: No
PageFile Disk: No
Hibernation File Disk: No
Crashdump Disk: No
Clustered Disk: No
My QUESTIONS ARE: 1) Is there any way to salvage my data?
2) Have I fu##ed up by converting to MBR.
3) Will I have to send my HDD to the Data Recovery people (min $741 quote)
Thanks for reading this far, any Help is MUCH appreciated.