Is there any way of saving a completely unrecognisable hard drive?

I have two of them, both do the same thing. They don't come up in my computer, device manager, or disk management so I don't know what to do. I just want to be able to see what's on there, before I throw them out.

Western Digatal - 500Gb SATA / 16MB Cache WD5000AAKS

Thanks :)

Create a bootable MSDOS pendrive with Rufus Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way

Download WD Datalifeguard Diagnostics for DOS WD Support / Downloads / SATA & SAS / WD Blue / SE / SE16 (SATA II), extract and copy the dlgdiag5.exe to the root of the pendrive, boot from the pendrive using the one time boot menu and run it.

If it fails to recognise your drive, that is it - your external drive is dead.

In such a case, the next best thing you can do is to open the enclosure, take out the HDD and try out by hooking it as an internal drive on a desktop. In some cases only the SATA to USB interface card may be faulty and the HDD itself may be OK. ( In some WD externals, the SATA to USB interface is integrated with the HDD and in that case you are again out of luck. You can't do this.)

Finally, if you don't know what you have put in it, I presume that the data in it is of no value to you and since you have lived without it, bring down a sledge hammer on to the drive and destroy it.( Should this have been my first suggestion rather??????)

Haha, as to your last suggestion, I may or may not have memories (diaries, photos, old work) that I might want. I would love to sledge hammer it right now but would hate to permanently destroy something that might mean something to me.

I would love to try your first suggestion, but I'm failing to get Rufus to create the bootable USB as the file is an .exe file and not an image. So I'm not sure what to do about that?

Nevermind, I had to change it to FAT32 and FreeDOS

Backup all data on your pendrive before using Rufus.

Thanks. So I ran the first test, got 'error status code 0007'. I then did the bigger test, and it stopped a little way through it, saying 'too many errors, test stopped, error status code 0225'. But, now my computer is recognising that there is a hard drive there, but it's unreadable.

Are there any programs that will recover whatever is recoverable on the hard drive?

Thanks heaps.

When there are too many bad sectors, most data in there would have been corrupted.

While I can't say for sure whether you will get anything out of what I shall suggest, no harm in trying.

Try and see whether live Linux can see any folders/files that can be recovered.

Download Lucid Puppy (Ubuntu Compatible Build) 5.2.8 ISO from Long-Term-Supported WaryPuppy (LTS)

Create your bootable Lucid Puppy pen drive again with Rufus. (This time you will select ISO with the drop down arrow, click on the drive icon next to it and select the Lucid Puppy ISO (132.6MB))



Run Lucid puppy and see whether you can see any folders and files to recover.

[Go to the topic Recovering files from the non-bootable Internal Drive: in this thread Lucid Puppy way to recover files from a non-bootable computer on how-to. In your case it will be your external drive.]

I did all that, and both my good and bad hard drives do not come up in the bottom left hand corner, is there something I'm doing wrong?

I'm trying out the other bad hard drive, thought it was the same one but turns out it's a seagate st2000dl003 2000Gb. I can't find the software like the one you provided me for the western digital, do you know of any? Thanks