Allowed windows to "repair" drive, now is "corrupted or inaccessible"

[Piegoose]

Hi, so I've has a 1TB external WD drive that's had error messages when inserted for a few years - skipping them always got me into the drive fine. Well, last night I decided I'd just click the repair selection for some reason, and now it's inaccessible. In disk management it's now a RAW drive. I've gone into command as admin and tried "chkdsk" several times. The WD utlilties say the drive is okay. Not sure what else I could do.

 

[USAFRet]

Try a reformat, and recover the data from your backup.

 

[Piegoose]

Try a reformat, and recover the data from your backup.

It's an external usb drive so there was no backup. Do you mean there's a way for me to back it up currently in it's RAW state?

 

[USAFRet]

Try a reformat, and recover the data from your backup.

It's an external usb drive so there was no backup. Do you mean there's a way for me to back it up currently in it's RAW state?

Backups are what you do before the drive goes bad. Being an external makes no difference.

Now?
Try one of the typical consumer grade recovery tools.
TestDisk, EaseUS, or Minitool

However..."errors for a few years", and now this...good luck.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

"It's an external usb drive so there was no backup"

What's that got to do with not having backups?

I, too have an external HDD, plus two more as duplicate backups for the first one.

If anything, there's even more reason to back up data where external HDDs are concerned, since they are generally more prone to early/unexpected failure than internal ones in my experience.

 

[Piegoose]

"It's an external usb drive so there was no backup"

What's that got to do with not having backups?

I, too have an external HDD, plus two more as duplicate backups for the first one.

If anything, there's even more reason to back up data where external HDDs are concerned, since they are generally more prone to early/unexpected failure than internal ones in my experience.

I was assuming he missed that I said external drive and thought he was referring to some internal automated backup. If I did have the files entirely backed up I'd have reformatted right off the bat. Obviously it's good to backup anything, and about 50% of the files were actually also on another drive.