Hi,

I have a Seagate Barracuda 3000 GB external hard drive that stopped working on me and I would like to get the data off of it. In hindsight, I know that I should have backed up the data and I admit my mistake in that respect.

My external hard drive wasn't dropped or otherwise damaged to my knowledge and is under 5 years old. I believe it stopped working due to overuse. I took the hard drive out of its plastic enclosure and I power the drive using an Anker USB 3.0 to SATA adapter which should eliminate a faulty enclosure connection being the issue.

My hard drive sometimes shows up in Device Manager as "Mass Storage Device" but I'm still not able to access any of the files.

I ran the data recovery program EaseUs and a list of my files showed up but they all had file sizes of 0 kilobytes.

I've recorded what the drive sounds like here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7wTraDN6Ku-V3I2YVlPW...

How can I recover my data from this drive?

Thank you.

It could be a 4KB sector size issue. Seagate's external drives are usually configured with a sector size of 4096 bytes whereas regular USB enclosures are usually configured with 512-byte sectors.

Can you show us DMDE's Partitions window?

https://dmde.com/

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Are you saying that the drives they use in the USB enclosures are 4Kn and not 4Ke? I ask for my software purposes, I would love to have a 4Kn SATA drive for testing if they exist.

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No. The bridge firmware presents a 4KB sector size to the USB host. The drive behind the bridge is still 512e. When the bridge receives 8 sectors from the drive, it packs them into a single 4KB sector before transmitting it to the host. Seagate does this to enable the max LBAs to fit within 32 bits. This then enables the USB mass storage device to be used with Windows XP in MBR mode.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Oh, so when the drive is attached as USB it is seen as a 4K sector drive, so the OS would handle it as such. But when removed from the USB enclosure and attached directly it will be seen as a 512 sector drive, which would make the OS confused and unable to process it. Is that correct?

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Home of HDDSuperClone

Yes.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.