Data Recovery from External Hard Drive

[SMoore0307]

I am desperately trying to recover files and photos from my external hard drive. I have a Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB. It still runs and lights up, but when I plug it into my latop, it wasn't recognized by the laptop. After much searching online, I finally just sent an email to the Seagate people asking for help. They said due to the age on the drive, it's no longer under warranty, but felt that the data was still able to be recovered. Per their recommendation, I got a USB to SATA cable.

So I got the cable, took the hard drive out of the casing, but when I hook up everything to the laptop, it still doesn't work. The drive does not show under My Computer. It does show in Printers and Devices as "ASMT 1051," but I can't get it to do anything other than open its Properties.

In Computer Management, I can see the hard drive listed in a couple places...under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers as AMD SATA Controller. And under Storage Controllers as USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Mass Storage Device.

In Disk Management, the hard drive is listed as Disk 1, but I get a pop up that says "You must initialize before Logical Disk Manager can access it." with the option of Master Boot Record and GUID Partition Table. In my search for solving this data recovery issue, everything I've read says that if you click to initialize the disk, it will erase all of the data on the hard drive, so I'm not really sure I want to do this...

I downloaded and tried Partition Find and Mount, which told me that there are no visible partitions, and I also downloaded Recuva, which I don't know how to get it to do it's data recovery thing because there's not a letter assigned to the hard drive or something, but that's probably operator error.

I'm totally at a loss of what to do with it now. Hoping somebody might be able to offer some help...

Almost forgot, I have Windows 10 on my laptop.

 

[thejackal85]

Okay, so if you plugged it in and the drive showed up under Disk Management, then that means its physically still good; which is a good thing. So you're not out a total loss.

If I had to take a guess, it sounds to me like something happened while data was being written and it screwed up the volume. It showed up in Disk Management the way that it did because the current volume there is being labeled as bad. So Windows defaults to "correcting" the issue by initializing the volume again. When that happens, you are right, your data will be gone.

So, from this point, you have three options. You can have the data professionally recovered by Seagate or whomever and that will be expensive; a minimum of $1200, and that will be with anyone you try. Second option is you can try out some freeware and you might get lucky. Third, you can call it a loss with your data, initialize the drive and move on.

 

[Mr_Limo]

Your hard drive is dead, and in need of professional recovery at this point. Seen but not recognized is a common issue when they fail. Call DriveSavers (www.drivesavers.com). They offer a free evaluation. I've had great success with them in the past. Good luck! Oh, and my bet is initializing the drive won't work even if you're willing to write the data off...

 

[S Haran]

What is the model name of the drive? Are you able to check the SMART health status of the drive with a tool like... http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

Performing data recovery over USB is not recommended. Connect the drive directly to a SATA port.