Question Recovering data off an external hard drive not working

[sds20020024]

Hi.
So I've been trying to recover some data off of this external USB hard drive.
It’s a SONY 1TB External USB hard drive, (specs here)
I would have taken this to a professional data recovery service, but the data on this HDD is more of a 'nice to have again' kind of data than something very important.
So, what happened is that this HDD was plugged into an old laptop for a while, and the laptop turned out to have a lot of malware on it. (I found this later on when I was told to speed that laptop up; I ended up doing a fresh Windows install on it).
When the drive was plugged into that laptop, the files could be accessed normally, but when it was taken out and plugged into another computer, it didn’t show up in file explorer anymore.
I opened up disk management and it showed up as unallocated space, and prompted me to initialize the disk before it could be used.
https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img924/7031/PL55Ue.png

But when it tried to initialize it in either MBR or GPT, a window opened saying 'incorrect function'.
Here is what it showed:
https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/2863/ZMjnYl.png

I have recovered files from other drives before, and I thought it might be a corrupted MBR.
The next thing I did was to open up EaseUS data recovery wizard (as I have used this before), and scan the drive.
The problem is that the scan is stuck at 0% for about 14 hours, and the estimated time shows up as 2:38:00, but every 10 minutes or so, it resets and shows as 2:38:00 again, never counting down from there.
I know that scanning hard drives, especially big ones for data recovery takes a long time, but it is stuck at 0%, and the timer keeps resetting.
https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/9629/PTYtNR.png

I have verified that the EaseUS installation works by scanning a USB stick and all the deleted files show up after the scan.
I even made a bootable EaseUS media with their free tool, and booting off of that and trying to scan the drive, but the same thing happens.
Next, I tried to rebuild the MBR using AOMEI partition assistant, and it finished rebuilding the MBR, but still I couldn’t initialize the disk in disk management, or scan it with EaseUS.
I tried converting the disk to GPT, but AOMEI partition assistant couldn’t do it, showing this error.
https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/7098/p0XfLD.png

Also, AOMEI partition wizard freezes randomly just after opening when the drive is plugged in, but works normally when it’s not plugged in.
So then I opened up the USB enclosure, and plugged the Seagate 3.5 inch drive inside directly into my PC to make sure that it wasn’t the USB controller on the enclosure that was the problem, and surely enough, it wasn’t.
The same things happen, although disk management shows up a different prompt when trying to initialize it., ( showing up the error ‘data error: cyclic redundancy check’)
https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/1561/h57NzD.png
And also, I plugged in a working 3.5inch hard drive to the enclosure, and it showed up as it should, so the USB controller isn’t causing the problem.
When the drive is plugged into a SATA port in my PC, and I try to rebuild the MBR using AOMEI partition assistant it still finished rebuilding it, but when I try to initialize the disk, it fails, and shows this error:
https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/9051/CsKKos.png
At this point, I have tried everything that I know of.
I could just let EaseUS run and see what happens, but I doubt that will come up with any results as the timer keeps resetting.


Is there anything else I should try to do?
Any help at all is appreciated.

 

[Ralston18]

EaseUS perhaps: "Stuck scan".

May be corrupted in some manner....

Manually download EaseUS via the manufacturer's website, reinstall, reconfigure, and try again.

Note: Images in the last two links very small.

 

[sds20020024]

EaseUS perhaps: "Stuck scan".

May be corrupted in some manner....

Manually download EaseUS via the manufacturer's website, reinstall, reconfigure, and try again.

Note: Images in the last two links very small.

I verified that EaseUS was working fine by scanning a USB thumb drive, and it showed up all the deleted files.

Nevertheless, I uninstalled it, deleted any files left in my system drive, and then installed it again, but the same thing keeps happening.

 

[Ralston18]

One late thought:

When the scan sticks at 2:28:00 and/or at every 10 minutes or so do you see any related error codes or other entries in Reliability History?

Likewise for Event Viewer.

 

[fzabkar]

Can you retrieve a SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo?

 

[sds20020024]

Can you retrieve a SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo?

I did, and it doesn't show any SMART status at all.
CrystalDiskInfo and HWinfo show nothing at all.

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/3166/v1CKh0.png

 

[sds20020024]

I have tried everything I can think of, and nothing seems to work.

If this was mission critical data, I'd have a backup in the first place, and if I didn't have a backup at all, I'd have sent it directly to a data recovery company withought doing anything myself.

But since it's not mission critical data, I think I'm gonna give up and leave it as it is for now.

Although if anyone stumbles upon this thread and knows something that I'm mising here, please let me know.

 

[img]

This Sony enclosure contains Seagate ST1000DL035 drive, which is far from reliable. It is a mechanically poor design, and once it starts to go downhill, it does so very quickly, develops bad sectors on it's own due to it's weak heads. There are a number of common drives that are similar to this reliability and fragility-wise, though this (Rosewood) is one of the worst contemporary drive families. I met a few before, almost all of them suffered from weak heads problem. If the drive not showing up in disk management as (un)partitioned area just it's name appears in safely remove hardware (or you just try anything, and Windows reports "incorrect function") then it's probably a drive's hardware failure 'cause the operating system (Windows) can communicate with the USB adapter which is the outmost layer and reads what it sends as introductory burned data, but nothing beyond that (what the drive shall provide, thus no disk size, serial number and S.M.A.R.T. data). If this is the case, you can't do anything other than take a drive to a nearby data recovery company because it's a firmware or the heads related failure which has no D.I.Y. solution.