General Discussions

[ANTALA]

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?

[VarHar]

Sounds like your hdd still works, thats good.
if possible, first try Windows file recovery (winfr) i'd stay away from graphical tools unless you test them first, you key word will be recovering "deleted" files.
If your hdd is very broken, get a usb with medicat and try HDAT2 to fix issues and then EaseUS Data Recovery.
Medicat has other tools but im not familiar with them all.
Good luck

[ANTALA]

I pulled the drive out of the box and connected it directly to my PC via the SATA interface.
I see the following picture.

[goodplay]

Try asking on one of these OS forums, either https://www.tenforums.com/ or https://www.elevenforum.com/

[ANTALA · Accepted solution]

I did manage to solve this problem.

First, I managed to make a copy of the damaged drive using  Clonezilla.

I came across this video tutorial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L2vCS-dV-M


True, it cost me $97.95, but that's nothing compared to taking the disc to a technician. I risked losing my files forever. But I can't afford to pay a lot of money.
Let me tell you a little bit about how I did it.
I downloaded Hetman Partition Recovery , the program displayed my RAW drive, which used to be FAT, and started a full scan. It found most of my files and successfully recovered them. Yes, it couldn't recover all the files, but I was lucky: I recovered the most important ones .

And yes, make copies of important files (discs) for the future.

Also, thanks to everyone who tried to help me)

[Vynski]

For 15 years I had a data recovery business.  As long as I could get a HDD to spin up I could recover most if not all data on that drive.  I was familiar with Clonezilla and tried it and got better results from Get Data Back.  https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

They have a lifetime upgrade on the purchase and It used to be less than the Clonezilla and others that I tried.  When I had this business 64 bit CPU's were in their infant stages and I only had the 32 bit app.  Needed the 64 bit app for my own use one day and was quite surprised to see that the download was free of charge.  Also, I found cloning a disc with Clonezilla to be very confusing and a royal pain.  I use Seagate Disc Wizard to clone a drive.  

Just for your information.

The main thing is to use what you are familiar with and have been successful with it..