Help needed with external hard drive

lyzzi

lyzzi

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Lynn
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I'm not sure if this is posted in the right place :)

I have a sonnics 1TB hard drive and I can't access my pictures on it. The hard drive is asking me to format, but obviously I can't as it holds my files.
I realise now on hind sight that I should have backed up to more than one device but I haven't :oops: :$

What I'm wanting to know is, are there any programmes that I can download or buy on disc to recover my pictures from the external hard drive?

I've had a google but so far been unsuccessful.

Any advice would be very much appreciated thanks.
 
Its obviously been working as you have pictures on it so has anything changed?
First thought if its USB then plug it into a different port, reboot and see if that helps, if you can get access to another PC try it in there
 
Trying a different USB socket or a different PC might help, but if it happens on all of them it might be a bit more serious. It might be that the USB controller on the external drive has corrupted, usually doesn't affect the life/contents of the drive but it registers the drive on the PC as unformatted and needs to be formatted to be used. Whatever you do, do not format the drive. Usually if the controller goes it's possible to remove the drive from the casing and attach it to a pc internally or use another external caddy to test the drive.
 
Thank you all for your help.

I've tried the obvious ones but shall give the recovery site a go.....fingers crossed :)
 
Unfortunately for you my friend this is the end of the line for your hard drive, this is unless anyone can further my education in data recover the worst case scenario for any data recovery scenario. No windows based software will help if windows cannot recognise the drive and allow the hard disk to be allocated a drive letter.
Linux probably will not help as Linux hates (for good reason) unstable NTFS, FAT formatted disks.
I have never ever been able to recover data from a disk this far gone and I work in IT. Unless it is a mechanical failure (eg dropped, impacted) hard drives do not suddenly die, the OS would usually constantly warn about disk errors, at this stage you have time to copy data to a new disk and maybe only lose a few files..
If my knowledge about recovering data from faulty hard drives is not updated by the good folk on here, I'm afraid you have lost everything on that drive.
 
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Get the drive out of the enclosure into another or straight into a pc.

Sometimes you're lucky and it's just the enclosure that's dead.

Good recovery software should still help if it's just something like a bust file system structure. Otherwise it's off to a specialist which can cost hundreds.

There's a moral to this story......
 
If you are lucky inside the enclosure the HDD will have a SATA connector with a small PCB which converts the SATA interface to USB & you will be able to do as neil_g & others suggest, however not all drives have the SATA interface. I found this out the hard way with an external Maxtor drive which had an integrated USB interface......
 
broc said:
If you are lucky inside the enclosure the HDD will have a SATA connector with a small PCB which converts the SATA interface to USB & you will be able to do as neil_g & others suggest, however not all drives have the SATA interface. I found this out the hard way with an external Maxtor drive which had an integrated USB interface......
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Same with the portable wd mypassport drives. USB3 socket soldered straight on. Which is a pain as those things fail a LOT.
 
There is a program called Spinrite which can possibly help if the drive is giving problems and not the enclosure:

www.grc.com

With this you burn it to a CD and run it before the PC boots - set the BIOS to boot from your CD first.

It's about £70.00 (I believe) and gets a lot of good reviews.

As others have said if it's the enclosure gone wrong then you need to take it out and put it into your PC and try it.

As an asfter thought - the drive hasn't been encrypted has it because that can sometimes cause the PC to interpret it as just rubbish on it so it gives the "Do you want to format it" message.

Otherwise you could buy another caddy or a docking station:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/TeckNet-Do...1504714915&sr=8-6&keywords=external+hdd+caddy

And, as everyone else has also said do NOT format it!

And also remember - ONE backup is NOT a backup - I have about 5 different methods for keeping my photos safe!
 
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petersmart said:
Spinrite
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There's a blast from the past. We used it on a Tandon 286 which had an MFM drive that gradually ran out of true over time, so after a few months it would need a couple of hours warming up after being switched on before it was accessible. Leave spinrite running on it, which read a track, formatted it and re-wrote the data, one track at a time, and it would be good as gold for a month or two, then gradually start getting worse again.

This was when a 40MB (note, megabyte) hard disk would cost several hundred pounds.
 
onomatopoeia said:
There's a blast from the past. We used it on a Tandon 286 which had an MFM drive that gradually ran out of true over time, so after a few months it would need a couple of hours warming up after being switched on before it was accessible. Leave spinrite running on it, which read a track, formatted it and re-wrote the data, one track at a time, and it would be good as gold for a month or two, then gradually start getting worse again.
This was when a 40MB (note, megabyte) hard disk would cost several hundred pounds.
Click to expand...

In fact Spinrite is stll going strong and so is Steve Gibson the man who created it.

I listen every week on a Wednesday to his Security Now podcasts which I download fom his site - and they are incredible - over the years I have learned a great deal from him.

And the podcasts are also extremely easy to listen to with him and Leo Laporte (who runs the station) chatting about the issues - he also sometimes has what they call a "propeller head" edition where he goes really deeply into the subject - incredibly so.

You can download all the podcasts here:

https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm

Or watch here:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyCdvoWLPYc


However be warned - there is no set time for the podcasts and can easily exceed TWO HOURS - which is why I just listen while doing my chores :)

And I also remember having a 10MB (!) drive on a PC.

And about 20 years ago when the first 1GB drive came out it was £150 or thereabouts!

Now for that same price I can buy a 4TB drive - if only the price of everything else had fallen by the same amount!:(
 
I remember us* getting the first HHDs to fit in our proprietary PCs and they were 10MB 5.25" full-height. The standard brand we got was Rodime and they were so unreliable that the 'engineers' would order three at a time from stores as they then stood a chance of getting one that worked.

*'Us' was Wang UK where I worked from 1985-94.
 
If it's a physical failure (usually they start making funny noises and giving random errors), sometimes putting them in a sealed bag in the freezer for a bit can bring them back to life, but if it works you have to act pretty quick to copy everything that's important as it quickly warms back up and goes funny again.
 
Hi thanks everyone for your advice.
It's not sorted yet:( but someone is going to have a look at it for me :)
Hopefully I may get my pictures back.....fingers crossed
 
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