Problems with External WD 2TB drive

[sbail1]

A couple days ago there was a interruption in power and it caused some problems with my external hard disk. I can't access any data on the drive. Windows still sees the drive at the correct size and I can see that the data is still there when I go to properties it reads the drive a 1.81TB with 366GB used and 1.4TB free space. I open the drive in my computer and there are no files, it's empty. I ran Testdisk on the drive and it does see it correctly as 2000GB but when searching for a partition it get reads errors from the drive. Anyone have any ideas?

[Nick_CT]

Try some recovery software, I would recommend GetDataBack for NTFS. Sounds like you only have a logical problem which should be easy to fix.

[sbail1]

I tried that software and even though the drive is listed in my computer it doesn't show up within the program, it only recognizes my boot drive. Maybe the software has a problem detecting USB drives?

[fzabkar]

You need to clone your drive, sector by sector. Then use data recovery software on the clone.

In your case you need a cloning utility that understands how to work around bad sectors. Some freeware cloning tools are ...

dd_rescue: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/
ddrescue: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
HDclone: http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

Comparison between ddrescue and dd_rescue:
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Dd_rescue

See the following thread for a discussion of commercial and freeware cloning/imaging utilities:

The Best Disk Cloning Hardware/Software:
the-best-disk-cloning-hardware-software-t10396.html

DDrescue is a multipass utility. It clones the easy sectors on the first pass and tries for the more difficult ones on subseqent passes. It can also clone your drive in reverse, effectively disabling look ahead caching.