Question External Hard drive turned Raw - Any help?

[Angiestech]

Hi, I'm having some serious issues with an external hard drive. I was transferring some files and my power went out suddenly causing my pc to shut off. Now it says my hard drive is RAW healthy primary partition and when I click the properties it says 0 bytes. When I click on the hard drive on my PC it says "the parameter is incorrect" I've tried various things I've come across on google and youtube but I've had no luck finding any files at all on the hard drive... are they gone?
I'm thinking have I wiped the drive trying to do all this recovery stuff?? because on the disk management it says 1863.01gb free space of 1863.01gb does this mean there is nothing on the drive?

I don't care about most of the stuff on there (iTunes etc) I just wanted my family photos/videos back. I've tried changing the letter of the drive, troubleshooting on windows. Nothing shows up... is there even anything on the hard drive at all anymore? I've tried the chkdsk (says won't work on RAW files) tried some recovery software I came across but they don't even pick up that there is an external hard drive!

I've come across these lines in my effort to find my data on the drive:
The parameter is incorrect
i/o device error
no partition found

Another thing to add is I've changed the USB port I used to use because I was noticing my PC desktop screen was turning black and freezing when the hard drive was in that certain USB port.

I've just ordered 2 new 2tb hard drives but I'm heartbroken about my lost photos, are they gone? 🙁

 

[Lutfij]

By recovery, did you try using a data recovery software? Like Recuva? From the looks of it, I'd be a little concerned with devices that plug into the desktop, since a power failure of that sort can't knock/conk out an HDD unless the system had a power surge in it.

 

[USAFRet]

While others may come here with various recovery methods, which may or may not work....please take this as a heads up to start a comprehensive backup routine.

 

[Angiestech]

I've tried some Cmd / changing the letter of the hard drive I have just tried to run Recuva but when I click the external hard drive to scan it says "the parameter is incorrect" so I can't even run a scan. It's a Seagate external hard drive I can see a blue light on it and sometimes hear is making a noise. Will it break my pc? :O

 

[popatim]

Does the drive spin up? Can you hear it and feel it vibrating?

 

[Ketchup79]

Recuva proobably doesn't like it because there isn't a partition. Recuva is good at recovering files that were accidentally deleted and not overwritten on a good partition, but when the file table is gone, that's a whole new ball game.

Try Easeus and the instructions given here:
https://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/recover-raw-drive.htm

 

[Angiestech]

Does the drive spin up? Can you hear it and feel it vibrating?

yes, I can hear the external hard drive making noise as if it's spinning inside

 

[Angiestech]

Recuva proobably doesn't like it because there isn't a partition. Recuva is good at recovering files that were accidentally deleted and not overwritten on a good partition, but when the file table is gone, that's a whole new ball game.

Try Easeus and the instructions given here:
https://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/recover-raw-drive.htm

Ok thanks, I'm going to give that a try

 

[fzabkar]

Can you retrieve the SMART report with CrystalDiskInfo?

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

 

[Angiestech]

Can you retrieve the SMART report with CrystalDiskInfo?

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

No, it won't do anything, it says "Disk Capacity is insufficient"

 

[Ketchup79]

Any progress?

 

[Angiestech]

Any progress?

No, I'm trying to run Easeus right now, its been going for 4 hours so far and it's saying "Scanning bad sectors, software is trying to jump over them, please wait (this could take some time)

it says 0 files found, I'm not sure it's going to find anything... I'm considering hitting stop on it.

I'm not that tech savvy, so this is very frustrating for me lol

I might give up soon, I've been trying all sorts for days 🙁 Most of the time nothing will scan because they can't seem to find the drive at all

 

[Ketchup79]

Ok. So it does sound like the drive is damaged. Do keep in mind that the EASEUS approach can take a VERY long time. In an era of SSD and quick formats, it's easy to forget how long it can take to manually scan 4 billion sectors (in a 2 TB drive, for example) for data.

 

[flashdata.io]

Can you show model of hard drive?

 

[fzabkar]

I agree that the HDD is faulty, probably due to a bad head or bad media or damaged firmware module.