Recover the hard drive

[Andrew Franton]

Hello, I have encountered an unpleasant event. My external hard drive has stopped working. The disc is no longer readable . When I connect the disc to my computer, the system asks me to format it.

There are very important files on the disc.


Does anyone know how to help me?

[mtx500]

It is important to find out whether a) there is a hardware problem with USB slot / the drive / UAB-to-SATA converter or b) it is just that the information on the drive has been damaged (the file system got corrupted).

USB slot: Try to use another slot on your computer - maybe power is too weak. If your USB cable has a second USB plug for additional power, use that second plug in addition. See if that helps.

Try to read out the S.M.A.R.T. parameters. You could use e.g. HWInfo https://www.hwinfo.com/, or you can use the diagnosis tool of the hard drive manufacturer. If the parameters are bad, there are only two options: Try to copy sector-wise as much as you can, at the risk of increasing the physical damage. Or send it to a professional data recovery company and pay a lot of $$.
If the parameters can't be read out, or if they show up good, but a read-write-test returns errors, then the problem could come from the USB-to-SATA converter inside of the external disk's case. Note: Some external hard disks have no separate USB-to-SATA circuit board anymore, but instead use a special variant of the hard drive's circuit board that directly connects to USB. So search the internet for the drive's model number to find out about the inside of your drive. If there is a separate converter, you can (crack) open the case, remove the disk and connect it directly to the computer or with an other USB-to-SATA converter.
If the S.M.A.R.T. parameters are good and there are no errors on read-write tests, then it looks "just" like a corrupted file system.

[Usualsuspect]

I’ll jump back on this topic because it hit me directly. In my case, a hard drive with photos from my son’s childhood got stuck and kept asking to be formatted. I thought there was nothing left to do and cried for a few days, then someone recommended Salvage Data. They returned everything to me within a few weeks on a new HDD.