Seagate External HDD, Disk unknown, not initilised - PLEASE HELP

Jennifer_87

Commendable
May 25, 2016
2
0
1,510
Hi,
Attempting to repair my Seagate 1TB hard drive. I have downloaded Minitools software and it has recognised my HDD as bad disk. I do not know how to use the partition recovery wizard and fear losing data if I proceed. I wish to save my data on this drive. I am not a computer novice, but can understand some technical terms. Could anyone please assist to repair my drive.
- Have contacted Seagate and recommended recovery software, unable to access drive on this.
- Hard drive was working, I had cc cleaner scanning for duplicate files, windows stopped responding, so I restarted it once it responded but it was taking too long so I forced restart. When I looked in 'This PC' it was not recognised, I checked device manager and it said the device is working properly. I checked Disk management and Disk 1 is unrecognised and not initialised.
- Called repair services around area, some have identified that it is a logical failure and possible partition problem
- Seagate dashboard drive test failed
- I have not tried cmd chkdsk in case I lose all my data.
- Data recovery services have estimated hundreds of dollars to recover my data
-Tried easeus and could only find 200+ files, I have approx. 400GB on drive
If anyone could help, please advise - My data life is on this hard drive
Kind Regards, Jennifer

 
Solution
My suggestion would be to just contact the manufacturers. Most of them offer their own data recovery services or have some sort of trusted data recovery partners. Also, I believe the guys over there should be able to provide some useful and more specific information.

Keep in mind that mechanical drives could just fail, in many cases, without a warning. You should keep the data you can't afford to loose stored on at least two places.

D_Know_WD
Hi there Jennifer_87,

That is really unpleasant. 🙁

Unfortunately, if the data is really important, your safest bet would be a data recovery company.
Your other option would be to just try using different data recovery tools.
One important thing would be to try to recover the data on another drive, so you don't overwrite the data stored on the problematic one.

I believe that the drive is failing, most probably due to bad sectors. You could see that if you test it. Yet, this is not a good thing to do until you've recovered your data.

Another thread on data recovery: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

D_Know_WD
 
Thank you all for your time, much appreciated. I tried to use easeus and it found some data, barely any that was on the drive. Today I took the drive to a pc repair shop and he told me it had 278gb unallocated and it took longer then usual to detect the drive, I left it with them and when I went back they had opened it up to connect it to the motherboard, I was told it is now a dead drive and they could not even get it to spin - I would not know if that was true or not, I was advised I could send it off to data recovery in Brisbane or Melbourne but it could cost me thousands. Anyway I have it home and Disk management still detects it after several minutes, Seagate dashboard detects it with 0mb of data and test indicates drive fail. light is working and some heat to drive. I just downloaded recuva but fear using that now because of D_Know_WD response that I could lose more data. I am devastated beyond words. Any more suggestions? SkynetRising - what screenshot do I post? Thank you
 
My suggestion would be to just contact the manufacturers. Most of them offer their own data recovery services or have some sort of trusted data recovery partners. Also, I believe the guys over there should be able to provide some useful and more specific information.

Keep in mind that mechanical drives could just fail, in many cases, without a warning. You should keep the data you can't afford to loose stored on at least two places.

D_Know_WD
 
Solution