[SOLVED] Hard Drive File System Gone. Is it still usable?

[suntower]

Seagate Barracuda 3TB circa 2015 on PC running Windows 10. It shows in BIOS but all data gone. When I go to Disk Management it says that the drive needs to be reinitialised. I ran GetDataBack and it says 'no file system'.


1. Is there any last chance for data recovery that I can do myself?


2. If not, and I reinitialise it, how can I test it to see if it's trustworthy?

 

[mdd1963]

The 3 TB models of a few different manufacturers had more issues than others, with higher failure rates, etc...

Does Disk Management at least show all the space of the hard drive as present? (2.8 TB or so)

If this data on the drive in question is critical to be recovered, I'd consult with '300 dollar recovery'...

If data not that valuable/critical , but you wish to proceed....IF you initialize it, which will result in a quick format, you can try running Recuva on it,(have another drive of adequate size as a place to store recovered data from; I've successfully recovered hundreds of GB of data from 600 GB, 1 TB drives which had been quick formatted....

If the drive is partially crashed, it might have very limited life remaining, so do not do detailed surface checks, etc., diskck etc from the command line...

 

[mdd1963]

if you are successful on recovery, and/or format the drive to attempt to use it again, I'd be looking at CrystalDiskInfo reports on that drive, looking for reallocated sectors, etc...

GSmartControl will let you run short/long tests on drives to determine usability.

 

[suntower]

The 3 TB models of a few different manufacturers had more issues than others, with higher failure rates, etc...

Does Disk Management at least show all the space of the hard drive as present? (2.8 TB or so)

If this data on the drive in question is critical to be recovered, I'd consult with '300 dollar recovery'...

If data not that valuable/critical , but you wish to proceed....IF you initialize it, which will result in a quick format, you can try running Recuva on it,(have another drive of adequate size as a place to store recovered data from; I've successfully recovered hundreds of GB of data from 600 GB, 1 TB drives which had been quick formatted....

If the drive is partially crashed, it might have very limited life remaining, so do not do detailed surface checks, etc., diskck etc from the command line...

Wait... you're saying that if I quick format it, some of the data may -then- be recoverable? That's good to know. I'm -mainly- concerned, though, about is whether or not I can re-use this thing. ie. how to test it.

 

[fzabkar]

Wait... you're saying that if I quick format it, some of the data may -then- be recoverable?

Please don't even think about doing this. Formatting is data destructive, even more so with an SSD. Your safest approach would be to clone your drive with a tool such as ddrescue or HDDSuperClone, and then run data recovery software against the clone.

Before you do this, I would retrieve a SMART report with the abovementioned tools (GSmartControl or CrystalDiskInfo).

That said, if GetDataBack finds nothing, then either your drive has a physical problem, or there is some serious logical damage.