For Macs, if your External Hard Drive is not showing up in Disk Utility. And you have ruled out damaged drive and cable. The next step you should try is using Terminal. Search Bar: Terminal. Type diskutil list, press enter. Find the Name of your External Hard Drive, it should show up here if it is not damaged.
I have a user with an external hard drive that is no longer recognised: the drive letter does not appear in My Computer. The drive is a Western Digital My Book Essential Edition (WD2500C032) With help from the, we have deduced that the most likely cause is a damaged or corrupt partition. We have looked at the drive in Disk Management and the full volume appears as unallocated. We have also run in recovery mode and that didn't turn up any defects, so the drive seems otherwise unharmed.
We would like to attempt to recover the data on the drive, and the WD site suggests 'With a damaged partition, there is data recovery software that may restore the data. You can research the various kinds on the internet.' Not exactly the most helpful advice! A quick search on Google yields a myriad of potential candidates, mostly commercial. The sheer number of offerings out there is bewildering. So can anyone offer any recommendations or experiences?
Is it even worth trying? Have you ever successfully recovered a damaged partition on a drive, external or otherwise? Do not attempt any recovery of a HDD while it's still in an enclosure. Cut that sucker out if you need to and plug it in directly via IDE or SATA.
Best software for partition recovery Best software for file recovery I've succesfully used both several times a year with clients who get nuked drives. On a drive that may have 'bad' or 'damaged' sectors it is highly recommended to do a clone of the problem drive onto a new drive using. There are a couple of 'dd' based programmes. That one is the best. Check the Duplicating the disk and working on the new one will improve your chances of success due to possible mechanical failure of the problem drive during recovery. Or if you just want to do it on the problem drive then run a Seatools test which is fine for any brand drive (they each have thier own progs but this is best):.
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Seagate Seatools All the programmes mentioned are available on livecd's. Below is a good list. TestDisk did the trick: it was indeed a partition gone AWOL. Your suggested apps are really great - solid, simple, utilitarian.
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Just how I like 'em. I couldn't make use of CloneZilla because, as far as I can gather, it requires a partition to operate on and it couldn't find one. Confession: I didn't remove the drive from its enclosure. While I would ordinarily take your advice, my instincts suggested that it wasn't a fault with the controller.
It just didn't feel like circuitry gone wrong. Having said that, we are going to replace the drive ASAP.:-) – May 12 '09 at 14:23. To answer the question title and since it's not tagged Windows I figured I'd throw in this for completeness: If this was on a Mac, and the drive was formatted for HFS+ (standard for most Mac drives) or FAT32 I'd recommend the following steps:.
Open Disk Utility.app in /Applications/Utilties. See if the partition is simply unmounted or if Disk First Aid will fix the issue - use Verify Disk first.
Try - it's a mainly one trick pony that any sys admin who works with Macs should know about because it works. If you need to do File Recovery try using.
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