External Drive HELL!

[Cheddar]

Hi all,

I have a Western Digital Elements 2TB external hard drive connected via my Netgear router's USB port. I use this to stream video and music files.

At weekend, it just decided to delete all the files from it (well, all apart from a handful of video files)

The Photorec software was working successfully in recovering the data, but it was chopping some of my video files into pieces, renaming files and it didn't retain the original folder structure. Then I came across some other software (Hetman Partition Recovery) which CAN retain folder structure and original filenames. Sadly, this would not work with the USB drive connected via my router. So I tried connecting the drive via my PC's USB port. It was not recognised.

I decided to strip the drive down this evening and insert the drive into my PC, connecting it via a SATA cable. No drive letter is assigned, so again, I am unable to use any software to access the drive. In Disk Management, the drive is showing as:

Disk 0
Basic
1863.02GB
Online

Healthy (Primary Partition)

BUT, when I right-click on the drive, all options other than 'Delete volume' and 'Help' are greyed out.

Any suggestions as to how I can get my data back, or at least get my PC to recognise the drive so I can use the Hetman software?

Many thanks in advance!

[xsoliman]

Look for legitimate demo copies of Restorer Ultimate and R-Studio on the web, and use them to scan the partition