External Hard drive Data recovery Help please

[Omians]

so yesterday night my external drive has chosen to not work properly, the night before i could use it but now its asking me to format it, and ive tried it on multipul computers it gives it on all of them, friend of mine had me get mini tool partition wizard to look at it.

it sees the files in it, i cant access them at all but its also saying that the harddrive it full and cant put anything more into it

downloaded MiniTool Power Data Recovery but sadly it only recovers 1 gb of data on teh free version

anyone have a program they use for data recovery?

i have a bunch of TV shows and my music stored on this and i dont want to reformat it all

[Elhana]

Google is your friend - find free tool or buy that one you mentioned, I heard piratebay had a sale.

[Omians]

well that narrows it down to.. a ton im asking what people are using, then i can google or alternative, not going to risk getting a farce one and end up with a worse situation

[c0rnel]

Try turning it off, plug it back in then go into Computer, open the drive if u can. What OS are you using?

Pretty sure u don't need software to do that. U can do it all manually.

[Omians]

its been on and off a few times when going to different computers, running windows 7 and the external is
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...TSFY-_-Satisfy

[c0rnel]

There's not a whole lot u can do about it if some sectors are corrupt now or part of the drive doesn't work (not sure exactly what's wrong with it but if it's out then u're kinda limited). I doubt recovery software will help.

U can try Recuva: http://www.piriform.com/recuva

It's free.

But remember u may not able to recover everything or if u may it may not be the full contents of the files/folders. Good luck.

[Omians]

its just 27 gb of stuff, the recovery tool that let me get 1 gb of stuff saw everything but would only let me pull 1gb of it, so the stuff is there.. just getting to it, atm im giving EASEUS data recovery wizard a try

[c0rnel]

Ya give Recuva a try or the easeus program like you said. Hopefully u'll be able to get everything off from there.

[mercutiouk]

personally I use active@ undelete (tried the demo, worked a treat, bought it. It's saved my ass twice since). There's plenty of good free ones around but I think it's about $20. Depends what your data is worth to you and how good the free alternatives are.

[Omians]

i was able to get my stuff out of the harddrive, but sadly the file names are not all original and i have to go through and fix it all

[NehwalSaina]

Your external hard drive was corrupted so that it prompts for formatting, now the data which you got has not the original format. If you want your original data then you need to an efficient software like Kernel for windows data recovery software for such requirement, it supports windows file system and will defiantly provide your data from that external hard drive in original format.

[llDemonll]

Use Recuva. I've used it numerous times before with success

[James12]

Hi Omians,

So you are saying that formatted your external hard disk and lost all your data from it and on which platform did you format the external drive was it on Windows or Mac. The software which I use on Mac machine in this kind of situations is called recover macintosh software. The tool recovers data from internal and external hard disk and has the ability to recover huge amount of data. It is one of the finest software to perform Macintosh hard drive recovery. To know more about the software and to download it, Follow the below links

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[chazus]

If you haven't already formatted your drive, try TestDisk, it may be able to restore your corrupted drive to usable state.

I haven't used it myself to success, but that was because the drive I was working with was actually having hardware failure, not software/file system problems.

In using it however, I found that one of the things it tries to do is restore the FAT to something useful. That may well just straight up solve your problem.

[traen]

So you are saying that formatted your external hard disk and lost all your data from it and on which platform did you format the external drive was it on Windows or Mac

He said that his OS is asking him to format his disk drive. Meaning that his OS is windows, because mac does not behave in such ridiculous way.
It is impossible to restore data after formatting without extremely expensive hardware equipment. Unless quick format was used, obviously.

The first thing I would do is to connect the HDD directly to the computer. Just disassemble your external disk drive and you'll see an ordinary hdd inside, most likely 2.5 drive with sata interface.
Don't do this is you have more than 1 hdd inside your external drive because it means that your box got built in raid controller and it might be not easy to work with data without it.

There is a lot of data restoration software and ALL of it is extremely buggy and ineffective.
Start with Recuva as relatively stable free software and than go with anything you can find.
I would not recommend buying any of the data recovery software because buying it does not mean that you'll get your data back.
There is nothing more frustrating than paying 40$ for a piece of software that just crushes at some point of the scan/recovery. And you cant get your money back.
So free software --> cracked software --> if you found what you like, pay for it or donate, if its free.

Start with Recuva.
The other software from the same company, Deffragler, is pretty nice as well. Its defragmentation software that does not require installation or rebooting. I must confess that I once had to use it on huge enterprise data storage with over 300TB of data and over 2 billion files and it worked like a charm. Pretty extraordinary achievement for a free desktop software.

[chazus]

I kind of want to disregard everything you say purely on principle, due to so much misinformation.

It is impossible to restore data after formatting without extremely expensive hardware equipment. Unless quick format was used, obviously.

False. Data can be recovered from a normal non-quick format. A 'full' format does disk checking, which is mainly why it takes longer. It is not a 0-fill.

There is a lot of data restoration software and ALL of it is extremely buggy and ineffective.

All of it? Every one? I've used plenty of recovery programs over the years, most of them well known. I can pretty much say that statement is false.

I would not recommend buying any of the data recovery software because buying it does not mean that you'll get your data back.

However if your data is EXTREMELY important, there are data recovery services that are more effective than any software you can buy. Not only that, but most data recovery software suites have a 'demo' to at least show that it can recover something. Then it's definitely worth $40. Or $100. Or $200. Or whatever.

The other software from the same company, Deffragler, is pretty nice as well. Its defragmentation software

I'm not sure how defragmenting is relevant to data recovery. But whatever, I guess. I've never used defrag software on a failing or corrupted drive, but it seems like a poor action to take.

[traen]

False. Data can be recovered from a normal non-quick format. A 'full' format does disk checking, which is mainly why it takes longer. It is not a 0-fill.

Your information is way outdated. Unless you are running pre-vista version of windows, the format command fills the disk with zeroes by default. You can change this behaviour if you like ofc via registry or by formatting from command line with corresponding switch.

The format command behavior has changed in Windows Vista. By default in Windows Vista, the format command writes zeros to the whole disk when a full format is performed. In Windows XP and in earlier versions of the Windows operating system, the format command does not write zeros to the whole disk when a full format is performed.

Proof

All of it? Every one? I've used plenty of recovery programs over the years, most of them well known. I can pretty much say that statement is false.

Yes. All of it. And the reason I see why you did not experienced problems is just because you did not have any complicated cases of recovery. Like HDDs with bad blocks, broken controllers.
ALL. ABSOLUTELY ALL user-friendly recovery software crashes or hangs at some point of its work. And I experienced problems with every popular recovery software at some point.
When it happens you just have to use another software that won't crash in your particular case. But this new software will crush or hang on another recovery.
Sometimes nothing helps and you have to use low level disk utilities like mhdd to either recover the broken cluster(with or without recovering the data on it) or to write a low level disk dump to a file and recover the information from it.

If you have any good examples of flawless recovery software that never hangs or crushes, feel free to post a link to it.

I'm not sure how defragmenting is relevant to data recovery. But whatever, I guess. I've never used defrag software on a failing or corrupted drive, but it seems like a poor action to take.

The defragmentation software is unrelated to recovery. It was related to recuva. Sorry that it was not obvious to you.

[llDemonll]

This thread is 3 months old. Please don't fall prey to spambot necro's!