Good day, I recently used VeraCrypt to encrypt an external hard drive (Seagate 1TB) and long story short, the drive is now corrupted and unfortunately I do not have a complete backup of the drive. Windows 10 does not recognize the drive and wants me to format it. I believe it is in RAW state.

I have used a number of free tools (Recuva, TestDisk, Mini Tool Power Data Recovery, M3 Data Recovery) and a paid one (Kroll Ontrack EasyRecovery) to try to recover the data, to no avail.

EasyRecovery detected and recovered the most number of files but I was not able to open them because they all seem to be corrupted. What is unusual is I used EasyRecovery to recover a number of deleted files off the main hard drive, as a test, and I still could not open/play them either. That leads me to believe there may be an issue with EasyRecovery but I am doing further research into this.

Could you please advise what my next step should be before I contact a local professional data recovery shop for estimate? It will not do me any good if they are able to recover the files and I am not able to open them.

Thank you very much!

"...I recently used VeraCrypt to encrypt an external hard drive..." My first guess is that the data recovery programs cannot interpret, cannot un-encrypt, the files.

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"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin revisited

It could be that drive is failing due to bad sector or FW problem or it could be that master key or critical data is damaged.

I would suggest to send it to Decent DR company and get the estimate.

good luck.

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Data Recovery Pakistan

Exactly this. Of course the data isn't recognized by Windows or data recovery software. It's ENCRYPTED!!!

If you used veracrypt + a password to encrypt, then you'll logically need to use veracrypt along with the password to get the data back.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company