[SOLVED] Help! I accidentally turned my 1TB external hard drive into a 2.85MB mass storage device! Can this be fixed?

[V.O.]

Hello there!

I have a WD Elements 1TB external hard drive with lots of important files in it. I was watching a youtube video on how to download Linux mint to a USB and I had no idea it had to be an ordinary empty USB. So I used balena.io/etcher/ to do the whole procedure and after flashing I realized my 1 TB external drive was converted to a 2.85MB mass storage device!!!
I cannot afford to lose all that data nor to buy another external hard drive! Can someone please help me??? I would really really appreciate it!!!

Thanks!!!
Vassiliki

 

[V.O.]

Windows Disk Management can initialise and format your drive (after you have recovered your data).

You can recover all your files for free if you are prepared to sit through multiple sessions of DMDE.

Hello again, fzabkar! I have two more questions if you don't mind. 1) Will my external drive be reliable and functioning as it used to after initialising and format? 2) All this happened because I tried to download Linux mint all by myself . Do you think this is too risky?

 

[fzabkar]

The error was a logical one, not physical. This should have no bearing on the reliability of the drive. In any case you should periodically examine the drive's SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo or GSmartControl. Look out for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors.

 

[V.O.]

The error was a logical one, not physical. This should have no bearing on the reliability of the drive. In any case you should periodically examine the drive's SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo or GSmartControl. Look out for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors.

Ok! Thanks a million!!! 🙂

 

[V.O.]

The error was a logical one, not physical. This should have no bearing on the reliability of the drive. In any case you should periodically examine the drive's SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo or GSmartControl. Look out for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors.

Hello again, Fzabkar!
If I'm not asking for much, I would need a little help in the last step. I've recovered my files from the external hard drive and then went to Disk management to reformat it as ntfs as you told me too, but I can't find how to do this formatting from there. Could you please tell me how to do it? This is what I see when I open disk management.

https://imgur.com/pOxy26e

View: https://imgur.com/pOxy26e