My drive says “drive corrupt and unreadable”. How can I fix it?

Question

My drive says "drive corrupt and unreadable" in Windows. In Linux it's not getting detected at all. I cannot access my drive. It has lots of important data on it.

Is there some way to fix this? when I run the chkdsk command it gets aborted saying "master file table corrupted".

Answer 1

• If it shows up as a file in /dev/sd*, try to have a look at it's SMART values to get a better view on what's wrong. Try the manufacturer's maintenance-tool, run an extended test.
• If it doesn't show up there, check your drive's connectors.
• If it shows up, but you still cannot mount it, do a filesystem check; if it still doesn't work, try some tool like photorec to recover your files (unlike its name it also recovers other documents).
• Send the drive to some data recovery company, but that will get expensive (1000$ and more shouldn't frighten you).
• If you like to gamble a little bit and your drive doesn't show up, it might be successful to exchange the drive's controller. With most drives, that's quite easy. Try to find another driver of same model and if possible, same firmware version. Risky operation!

Will not help you for this drive: Think of a backup strategy!