External WD 2 tb Hard drive bacame unallocated, help needed please

[manoo]

hello,
I have been using my WD 2tb for over 4 years now as second drive, 2 days ago due to a usb port of my laptop being little loose, when I move my laptop a little, I noticed the usb cable disconnected/connected from my external usb hard drive, ( heard ding/dang as the result of something connected/disconnected) after that the Drive did not show in my computer, looked at Disk management tool it shows, it needs to be initialized and the disk is unallocated.
I am running Win 7 ultimate, 32 bit on Toshiba M300, having intel core duo cpu p8600 2.4GHz, 2 GB ram
and WD 2tb Drive is as my second drive, ( P/N: WDBU6Y0020BBK-05)

here is pics from Disk management tool when I check the disk:





since the beginning of using this hard dive, I have not reformat it, and it is formatted as 32 bit, as much as I remember ,it has only one partition.
it is being used as storage of my files, different kind of files, MS doc, excel, pp, pdf, family pictures, videos, backups, and more., unfortunately I do not have any backup of them, it is all my life in it, I did have a plan to move most important files into anther external 500 GB empty hd I have, but I just keep delaying it, stupid of me.
I believe that 1.2 to 1.4 tb is been used.

before doing anything I kept reading forums, and see what other people did with the same problem,

I have not initialize nor repartition the drive, I have used some software to see if I can repair the damaged partition, but I have not written anything on the drive yet.

these are the software I have tried:

Free edition of MiniTool Partition Wizard-pw11-, testDisk, EaseUs Data Recovery Wizard, AOMEI Partition Assistant,GetDataback simple.

all of them taking so much time for search the drive, that is little odd about time consuming, when it shows how much sectors have searched out of the total number sectors (about 3,906,963,456 sectors), a little of calculation, it shows that it takes more than one year to finish the searching, so after running them for hours, or over night and seeing the process not reaching 1%, I canceled the action.

couple of hours ago I installed GetDataback simple and let it run,
immediately shows error, this is the first picture of it.



I click ignore for couple errors but errors kept coming, then I clicked ignore all,
some of the errors show on the screen as you see there are lots of errors with the given LBA address.

this picture of it one hour and 30 min later,



so now desperate to see what else I can do, it seems that boot sectors and/or other sectors are damaged.

I know the partition recovery or file/folder recover could take hours, that is completely fine with couple of days, but what is time frame that I should expect for 2tb drive?
couple of days , months or years, it is little odd to me that it takes more than a year to go through all sectors of drive, that is why I canceled searching.

appreciate any help to get my data back,

 

[samuria]

Welcome to the forum. From what I can see the disk may be dead. You could try in another pc see if that reads it sometimes this happens. The other options are the USB port cable or interface is faulty. You could try in a PC which eliminates cable interface faults. A recovery firm may get your data back but it would cost you

 

[manoo]

thank you for your response,
I have tried it on another computer ( another Toshiba laptop, faster than mine, higher RAM, and using another usb cable, ( the original cable that was included when I bought it), but still not much luck with it,

 

[manoo]

OK, I gave my HD to a company to take a look at it and see how much they are going to charge me for retrieving my data from HD.
after 2 days the called me and said they tested the HD, and there are 3 damaged heads, they can turn off the three damaged heads and take image of HD with the good heads, and may not possible to take image of everything. so I was not sure how much data I could have, and the price was too much for me, so I took my HD back.
I went to another company to try, they connected HD to their computer and they said everything is up, they can see the folders and files, they asked me if I want to repair bad sectors it it better to take a back up first then give back HD to repair the bad sectors.

obviously when the first company connected my HD to their equipment, partition table was corrected,

anyhow, I came home and I connected the HD to the computer, the HD was recognized with the same Letter name, visually I see every folder and sub folders, and some files

some folders are empty, folders that suppose to have tons sub folders and files in it,
some other folders show sub folders and file in it, but I can not copy them, it gives me error
I was able to copy only few text files.

this is the error:
could not find this item, this is no longer located in K:

Is there a chance now to do something?
I don't want to do something stupid that I lose my chance now,
is it possible to take an image of those files that i see?
how about hose files that are visible?

appreciate your help.

this is two pictures of HD now:

 

[samuria]

You need a new big drive then copy everything over DO NOT make an image as it can copy bad sectors if you use built in robocopy its vert fast and just mirror the files to a new drive it may take many hours

 

[manoo]

thanks for your response, great info, I did not know about robocopy, I am happy that I asked.

 

[Pete4]

Years ago I was in similar situation and managed to manually repair disk myself with hex editor, but if Robocopy works, then you're good to go. But remember this: unless the sectors are damaged (and some probably are, when power was cutoff in middle of writting cycle), the data is lost forever, but it should be small amount. Everything else is there, but probably File Allocation Table is corrupted, but there should be back up FAT and that one should be fine and you should be able to recover most of the data, unless the disk is physically damaged. Basically don't give up, even if Robocopy doesn't work, there are other programs to try. I'm not sure why the first company said 3 heads are damaged: unless you dropped the disk on the floor, the heads should lift when the power was cutout, they shouldn't get damaged then and if they're failing before, you should have error messages, but I guess with disks anything is possible.