Question Hard Drive suddenly "unallocated", need to access files

[barnack]

Greetings,
In my computer i've a 1TB WD Black HDD with Windows 10 Pro x64 and a 2TB WD Blue HDD with Windows XP Professional x64. I use the 2TB as backup, and since for various reasons my main Windows 10 installation got screwed up not long ago, i had moved all the data to the 2TB drive.
Today i needed to access some of the things i had saved in the 2TB drive, but it didn't show up in my computer.
I won't easily accept quickly reaching the "it's dead" answer because a similar issue happened 3 years ago, and after reformatting the drive scandisk reported no damaged sectors. The difference this time is i need to recover around 500gb of the data it has, which won't fit in the 1TB even if i recover it. Although the drive is 5 years old by now.
Yesterday there was a power failure and my system got suddenly shut down because of it; and i guess since i was writing to it that it might have damaged the filesystem or something on these lines.

• Opening diskmgmt.exe on windows the drive is there, with it's usual size, but it results as entirely unallocated AND uninitialized.
• Through diskpart > list disk the drive is there
• On linux i tried running testdisk, mount and gparted, none of them even detected the drive.
• The drive isn't available as a boot option on the bios.

Even assuming a recovery tool could access to all the files without damage, i wouldn't have space to put them in unless i buy a new drive…
Following this link, using R-Undelete i right-clicked on the drive and chose the S.M.A.R.T. option. All it has to say is "Status: UNKNOWN".
R-Undelete also gives me an option "scan for partitions". After 4 hours it only scanned 1.4MB. Am i to assume it's that slow because it's a slow process, or it's really indicative of an hardware-level failure? In any case to prevent any risk i physically detached the drive for now and won't access it until i have something figured out.

____
Edit: i've -1Bytes of unrecognized space today, now that's new

 

[USAFRet]

The difference this time is i need to recover around 500gb of the data it has, which won't fit in the 1TB even if i recover it.
.......
Even assuming a recovery tool could access to all the files without damage, i wouldn't have space to put them in unless i buy a new drive…

Attempting to recover in place is a bad idea, even if possible.
You absolutely need another blank space to recover to.

I would cease all actions until you have a suitable location to recover to.

 

[fzabkar]

Can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/download.html

If you can see your partition, double-click it and expand the Root. Do you see your file/folder structure?

Note that this should take less than 1 minute. There is no point in a full scan.

Can you show us a SMART report?

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

If there are reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors, then this could explain why R-Undelete was crawling. In such cases you should clone the drive with a tool such as ddrescue or HDDSuperClone.

 

[barnack]

If anyone stumbles in this topic i can only say one thing: after you try to replace the sata cable with another one and it still doesn't work, instead of assuming there's no cable issue, try a third cable first...
Apparently the cable that was originally connected to the drive AND the second cable i swapped it to, were both faulty.

ty for trying to help anyways @fzabkar and @USAFRet. Btw SMART tests were "unavailable"