Hello,

Problem:

I wish to access data stored on my USB attached 2.5" Seagate SATA hard disk of 500 GB.

Background:

I wanted to prepare a bootable USB-stick. Following instructions in a guide, I entered diskpart where I accidentally selected the wrong disk, which I then used the command "clean" on, and then also "format fs=fat32". I noticed that the hard disk had stopped working and realized what I had done, and closed down the diskpart window when the process of "format fs=fat32" was still displayed as 0% completed. I then noticed that the icon in "My Computer" was gone and that the harddrive, although still attached, was not accessible.

I didn't think this would be a problem, as I have had other problems with formatted disks in the past, where a certain piece of software has always been able to recover the files without any major problems. I just ran the application I had used before, but the scanning showed a remaining time that was constantly ticking upwards. I cancelled the scan when the estimated remaining time was a few hundred hours.

I had not done anything at all to the disk yet, except running this application that I thought would be able to simply display the files and let me copy what I wanted onto another drive. Since the application didn't quite work, I posted in their forum and asked for help, which lead to trying a number of things with the application settings, none of which yielded any results. Bottom line is simply that this data recovery application, which I had used several times in the past with success, turned up 0 files, 0 partitions, ergo nothing at all on the hard drive.

Meanwhile, I started trying other scanning software and reading up as much as I could through Google. I found various applications and suggested solutions, but nothing worked. However, I didn't only try scanning with various applications (all of them gave the same result, namely nothing at all found on the disk), but also the following procedure: Based on instructions I found on another forum, I re-entered into diskpart - select disk - create partition primary - assign. This made an icon representing the drive show up under "My Computer".

Other than that I have done nothing.

What the scans and reserach has given this far is the following:

Disk shows as zeroed out: all sectors contain zeros.

All sectors are listed as bad.

Some 50,000 error messages in the Event Log that "The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR23, has a bad block.", with event ID 7.

Drive listed as either RAW (Windows tools) and FAT32 (some data/partition recovery software).

"MBR damaged"

"Cannot read from MBR"

Some Windows error messages:

"build master boot record error (00000017)"
"data error (cyclic redundance check)"

Drive is also listed as unformatted, not active, unallocated and not initialized.

Conclusion:

I am thinking about trying Testdisk and HDD Regenerator. I have already initialized scans with those tools, but the time it would take is very long.

I do not, however, have any sort of perspective on the situation. I don't understand what the problem is, and whether it can be resolved. The actual disk (in its USB attached enclosure) such has not been damaged physically in any way, thus it has not fallen on the floor or anything like that. I still wonder whether there is any possibility of recovering any data from the disk. If there is such a possibility, I just don't understand what the problem is and what I need to do. I can only try with all of these scans on the disk...

I'm thinking about creating a new partition with partitioning software, or to try to format it in Windows, and trying with some recovery software after that. I've seen some YouTube clip where that is how someone does; inaccessible HDD, formats it, enters some application and recovers the contents. Plus, I'm speculating that the problem for the software is that... well, that it's just not designed to deal with a disk in the state mine is, and that it might be easier for it to deal with it after I've formatted it. So I have no idea!

I would really appreciate it if someone could help me out!

You should clone that drive to a healthy drive and then run scans on the clone. Seems like your drive may also have bad sectors and so standard imaging tool is likely not to complete the process successfully and actually cause further damage.

I would say for DIY at this point, if you have already removed the drive out of the enclosure, get a copy of MHDD, connect only your target drive and run a scan to see if it has bad sectors.

If the data is valuable I would recommend taking it to a pro.

If the data is not valuable, use the warranty to get a new one.

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

You should not do anything else that writes to the disk (formatting, initializing, hdd regenerator, etc)

At this point it is not clear if you are actually accessing the sectors or not... Best plan would be to attach the drive directly (not through USB) and clone it. If you can't do this or don't know how, you should take it to someone who can/does.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.