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I had a WD 2TB external drive which I transferred successfully to a USB 3.0 enclosure months ago. Then I moved and the drive has been packed away in the trunk of my car since.

I just got it out as I need some files on it, and when I hooked it up it didn't work: the computer recognized it as a CD drive or something... in Computer it would not show up or show up as just a drive letter ... in disk management it said No Media. I tried it on another PC too to no avail.

After much research, the most likely solution looked to be to get a new enclosure. So I did, but the drive still isn't working, but in a different way.

When I first hooked it up, all looked well: the system tray showed correct recognition of the drive and enclosure type/brand and installed the drivers successfully.

But the drive no longer shows up in Computer at all, and in disk management it now prompts me to initialize the disk, and has it marked as Unknown, Not Initialized.

I have spent all day trying to fix this problem, and have read a million threads on different sites and tried everything, to no consequence. I need the files on the drive, and have tried all of the following:

  • booting in ubuntu and knoppix via cd - drive is not recognized

  • every major app for this type of problem i saw recommended: seagate seatools, partition wizard, wd data lifeguard diagnostics, power data recovery, find and mount, a bunch of stuff on hiren's boot cd, test disk, etc.

In most cases, the drive was not recognized at all. In a couple instances it was, but no scans were successful - they would instantly say failed, or complete instantly showing no results.

The drive sounds fine when it is turned on/hooked to the pc: it sounds normal, spins like it should, no weird noises.

I have no idea what to do. The only thing left that I'm aware of is to initialize it (against most of the advice I read) and hope it then at least gets recognized by some of the recovery apps.

But I don't want to lose my data and this seems like an absolute last resort.

How can I recover the data on this drive?

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    I have bad news for you. For whatever reason the drive has failed, it likely is a mechanical failure, and you have likely exhausted every other method to mount the volume to retrieve the data. Hopefully you have more then a single copy of the data.
    – Ramhound
    Jul 2, 2016 at 11:16
  • i dont get the feeling this is the case. it could be, but it sounds and feels totally normal when connected. it sounds exactly like it's supposed to.
    – TRoot7
    Jul 3, 2016 at 7:48
  • A HDD with a bad sector doesn't sound any different then a HDD with good sectors......
    – Ramhound
    Jul 3, 2016 at 8:06
  • It spinning doesn't mean that the heads can move freely, they could be locked up off platter or the movement actuator could have failed. In those cases all you'd know is "it spins, sounds fine".
    – Mokubai
    Jul 14, 2016 at 7:12
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    Can you just ditch the enclosures? Connect a cable straight from the drive to your motherboard? If so, START by creating a bit-for-bit image (also known as byte-for-byte, or a "forensic" image, sometimes called a "RAW" image). If that is done successfully, that can often help you recover if you overwrite data during other attempts to recover. Be extremely careful.
    – TOOGAM
    Jul 14, 2016 at 7:32

2 Answers 2

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Make a bootable CD/USB/ or etc of mhdd, and try and scan it with that first. You may have to temporarily disable AHCI in your BIOS and/or connect the drive directly to your PC to get the program to recognize your hard drive. Set the options to reallocate bad sectors. This program hasn't been updated in ages, but you can usually get it to see your hdd.

If you now have a larger hard drive, you can use PhotoRec by cgsecurity to rip all the files off your old hard drive. Depending on the condition of the data it may scramble some of your filenames. Also it will have the side effect of recovering deleted files.

If the recovery goes well you can re-formatted the old drive, and then try and copy the data back.

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  • I've recovered files from a Ubuntu laptop (ext4), which was reformatted and repartitioned to NTFS. The complete filesystem was gone, all filenames gone, including file dates, but the files were all there. You will need another HD to write the data to.
    – SPRBRN
    Jul 14, 2016 at 7:41
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Disk management shows that there is a disk. You should try Photorec, just like Cybernard says. The first part of his comment - I don't know about that. If the disk is physically recognized by the OS - in disk management - you should be able to use Photorec. That would be the first thing to try now.

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