Strange HDD Issues

[Metiiin]

My coworkers external hard drive crapped out this morning, minutes before going into a meeting that he needed the files for. I have been working on recovering the files all day and have had 0 luck.

It is a Seagate Backup Plus Portable 1TB HDD

If I have it plugged into my computer when I restart, my computer will not boot. If I go into disk management the drive does not show unless I go to Action -> Rescan Disks. Now there are two issues, one is that it is uninitialized and two it displays it as having 18,446,744TB unallocated, yes Terabytes.

I would very much like to recover the data that is contained on the drive if possible. First I used my go to disk recovery programs, Recuva and Partition Wizard. Neither worked, the only actual error I get is "the request cannot be performed because of an I/o device error". In the past I have had luck with running Ubuntu and doing whatever with the hard drives. In this case I still cant do anything. It allows me to format, however after a few minutes says that I cant format over 256TB, I also get the error (udisks-error-quark, 0).

At this point I have no idea what to do. The data on the drive is pretty valuable. If anyone has any idea on what to do I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[alceryes]

I have previously recovered data from a drive by removing it from its external enclosure. Of course, you'll void all warranties if you do. In my case the drive was fine it was the enclosure circuitry that went bad. The 'freezer trick' sometimes works as well.

 

[Metiiin]

I have previously recovered data from a drive by removing it from its external enclosure. Of course, you'll void all warranties if you do. In my case the drive was fine it was the enclosure circuitry that went bad. The 'freezer trick' sometimes works as well.

I tried taking it out already, plugged it in via SATA cable instead of USB, still no luck. Any recovery software I try to use gets hung up because it is telling the system that it has such an incredible amount of space on it. I cant run any Windows commands to fix it either because it has no drive letter to use as a reference. I looked all over the place but I haven't seen any similar issues. All other instances have the system displaying maybe half of the normal space, never larger.