Please HELP! External Hard Drive Recovery

06 Jun 2013

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.

Mark Phelps · 07 Jun 2013

What you can try, which will cost something, but a lot less than professional data recovery, is using a well-known data recovery app to see what it can find and recover. The download and trial is free -- so at least you can see how well it works without spending anything. Since this does not use the partition table to find files and directories, it tends to work well in these situations.

The actual recovery requires purchasing a license -- but that can be installed without rebooting or reinstalling the app. If you're interested in this, go to Runtime Software and read about their RecoverMyFiles app.

ICIT2LOL · 07 Jun 2013

Another method is to make a bootable Ubuntu disk - boot from the disk and use the TRY option the drive will show up and you can open it as you do in Windows and recover info / data form it to another source / drive / stick etc

Download Ubuntu Desktop | Ubuntu save to downloads then make the disk using something like ImgBurn set the BIOS to boot from the optical slip in the disk and let boot.

The drives in or attached to the machine will show up down on the left hand side of the screen just click on them and open > open etc etc

I am a way form home at the moment or I could send some pics of what I mean. but this is wuite good Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Screenshots

This is a good method for "unlocking" drive s that cannot be read too or the password is forgotten as long as you have one of those USB gadgets to hook up a drive externally.

07 Jun 2013

Thanks guys, !!!