MAXTOR6E040L0 wiped itself clean. when trying to access it i am told,
"this drive has not been formatted. would you like to format now?
admittedly the drive was nearly full yesterday, but over night it has just emptied.
I have tried a couple of freeware programmes with no success. is there any hope of recovering the data with a free programme? i am not trained in any computer languages or courses, but i can follow instructions ok. please help. any idea's?!?!

I would recommend to image the drive to another drive or just create an image file to another drive, then run something like R-Studio demo.

What makes you think the drive wiped itself clean?

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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

I very much doubt it has wiped itself clean!

Is it seen PROPERLY in the bios? As in model number and correct capacity.

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what does that mean exactly and how do i do it?
i only thought it had wiped itself because it wont let me access it and says used space and free space has reset to 0

I recommend seeking a data recovery professional.

Not to undermine your abilities, but your questions and how you ask makes me believe that you will not be able to handle this project without jeopardizing the data on the drive.

Better safe than sorry.

Best wishes.

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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

Totally agree with labtech and pcimage.
Your data haven't vanished. They're there, but you need to perform a series of actions to get them back.
These actions involve steps which i am not sure you can handle (like imaging and running recovery).

Better ask a pro in your area.
Then again, if you insist in diy, you must use an imaging s/w to copy sector-by-sector your drive to another drive.
Then run R-Studio demo on the drive you created and see what it outcomes. In case it is successful, you will have to buy the R-Studio license and recover your data.

Good luck!

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missed the previous messages. ok thanks for all your input. im sure with a little instruction and a few "hell no don't do that", pointers i can figure it out, i'm quite methodical and even if it takes me a week i'll crack it.

Hi, you need to know whats going on with your drive so a good start would be to take a look at the smart attributes record. You would also be able to confirm other important information about your drive

You could use Mhdd or even Victoria for Windows to do that and then post back with your results. For the moment avoid any of the other functions available to you! Take a screen shot and post it.

I would download the user guide from R-studio as this would then give you an insight as to what MAYBE needs to be done: http://www.r-tt.com/downloads/rstudio.pdf

There are several possible scenarios here and the final outcome could be you lose your data or cause more damage so read up and take care!