Suddenly a 3TB WD external disk stopped showing in windows. I removed the disk from its case and plugged directly on motherboard’s SATA. After a long time waiting the disk was recognized by device manger but as a non formatted one. The disk is a Green WD 3TB. On my first attempt to recover files with Get Data Back Simple the disk was recognized as NTFS 2,8something TB with almost all of the files ready for recovery. I’ve decided to proceed in a “sophistication” scan of the disk, as it's called in the program. Because of it’s long time scanning, I left it overnight. Next day the program wasn’t responding. On reboot the disk is recognized in the device manager with the correct name (WDV WD30EZRX-00D8PB0 ATA Device), but has only LBA 1, with 512 bytes size. How can I see the full capacity again for recovery?

Windows 7 x64

The data on the drive is likely encrypted, therefore scanning for files is useless. Perhaps, posting the full model of the external could allow us to confirm to some degree.

Additionally, the drives inside those externals often fail in ways that a simple connect and scan recovery approach will be unsuccessful. Quite frequently, they have problems at firmware and mechanical level, and of course bad sectors.

So, a bit of advanced testing is necessary to figure out what is going on with the drive. If you are one of those folks who are eager to take a stab at it despite the risk of losing their data, then I would read on MHDD for a non-expert diagnosis. If you are not comfortable and your data is valuable, then suggest to stop poking around and consult with a data recovery specialist.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Dear labtech,
Thank you very much for your immediate answer.
The data on the disk weren’t encrypted, at least not from my usage. On my first approach the recovery program had read the disk data and it was ready for extraction, but I decided to go for a deep scan of the disk. After the program crashed and rebooted, that’s when the disk became completely unreadable.

I don’t have the info for the external case right now but I’ll find it soon.

I’m kind of familiar with computer stuff so I would like to try something on my own. The data aren’t that important. Would you be more specific how I could continue?
Thank you in advance.

The drive was likely starting to fail when you first started looking at it and is now at the point where you are left with little choice but to seek the assistance of a data recovery pro. Had you been cloning the drive first and it had failed, at least every sector you had read to this point would have already been copied to another drive, still giving you a chance to recover the data yourself. But, hindsight is always 20/20...or at least it should be.

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Luke
Recovery Force Donor Inventory: 5,000+ Fully Cataloged HDDs & Growing

Again, this won't recover your data, but rather allow you to get an idea of what is going on with the drive, which is the primary thing to do. Though without experience, it may not be as apparent. Also, read the forum a bit.

http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Can you show us a SMART report?

http://crystalmark.info/software/Crysta ... dex-e.html

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Crystal Disk Info doesn't show the disk in the disk list.

HDDScan for Windows 3.3 shows the drive but everything is deactivated when I select this drive.

Thank you for your peply,

As I can understand there is no salvation any more for the disk. Data in the disk aren’t that important to be sent to a data recovery company.

Anyway, for future reference, what do you mean “slow fix”?

Hardware assisted tool? Something like cloning device for example, RaidSonic?

Hi, don't gamble with your data, Contact member Northwind he's in your area.
memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=9788

Bosse

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

@jaco4377, what does CrystalDiskInfo tell you about the drive? Is it able to access the SMART data? Can it see the drive's firmware version, serial number? If so, then this will prove that you still have access to the drive's System Area (SA).

If you remove the PCB from the drive, does the BIOS still detect it?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.