My friends external hard drive has ceased working, when plugged in it says something along the lines of:

“this hard drive must be formatted”

on my Mac it says:

“the disk you inserted is not readable by this computer”

it can still be heard whirring but clearly something is up.

There are files she would like to recover.

Has anyone got any suggestions of what to do next or who to take it to for a look?

Thanks.

First thing I’d do is take it out of the caddy and try it on a regular SATA cable.

Second thing I’d do is try Recuva. I’ve not used it personally but had it reliably recommended.

Zeroth thing I’d do is say “make backups you silly bint.”

I’ve had success in getting at stuff by copying whole partitions onto new/spare drives using MiniTool Partition Wizard, free version from cnet download site. Then using dos/filemanager/Recuva to get the data safely out from the copy, when the HD has become incapable of maintaining it’s partition table after powering down.

+1 for minitool.

I use their power data recovery software, and have bought a full licence as it works extremely well on knackered HDDs.

Send it up to these guys – best in the business and pretty reasonable price wise.

http://Www.kingdomdatarecovery.co.uk – DIY fixes risk losing stuff.

Don’t be tempted by those “we’ll scan it and fix it….for $59”
Try running “chkdsk” in the cmd prompt.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/chkdsk.mspx?mfr=true

“best in business” and “pretty reasonable price” are likely to be mutually exclusive.

That said, if you want to maximise your chances of success then yes absolutely, send it to a professional. There’s a risk of making things worth as soon as you do any sort of DIY work that involves writing to the disk. In my experience though, most people aren’t willing to pay professional data recovery rates to get their “vital data” (holiday photos and iTunes library) back.

Try running “chkdsk” in the cmd prompt.

Checkdisk is unlikely to run if it can’t even read the partition table.

Cheers all, some good suggestions.

The owner of the disk is a realist. The data is perhaps not ‘vital’ but it certainly makes her work easier so it may well be worth paying someone to do it.

The content is professional rather than personal.

@cougar – hmmm helpful and not even vaguely patronising. Thank you.

OK, progress update.

Checkdisk did not work

Drive Image (recommended by someone else) did not work

Minitool is doing something!

Pressed ‘full scan’ and it has been running for 12+ hours now, it has found a lot of files but not sure what it is actually doing, is it just a health check or will it fix it or is that the point you pay up to recover the files 😀 ?

If minitool finds files, recuva quite likely will too, and I think it is completely free. In recuva, you can tell it part of the file name you’re looking for and it will get that out.

Apparently a linux boot disk will often be able to read disks that are in this state too.

Last time I knew anyone needing professional data recovery, cost them £500 for a single disk, although that was a proper dead disk which didn’t spin up, not just a little bit corrupted. Got all their data back though.

Say for instance the memory card had been formatted, and Recuva is finding nothing, what are my next options (if any)?

Trying to help someone out here, so comments along the lines of “Don’t format it in the first place need not apply!” 🙂

Cheers in advance.

Looks like our only option was denied, then.

Your options are:

1. Don’t format it in the first place

2. Get a time machine, go back in time to a point before it was formatted and Don’t format it in the first place