I have an external hard drive. WD Elements, 1TB. It recently stopped working.

First thing I noticed was that I didn't see it in the drives under my computer. Initially it wouldn't even show up in the Disk Management. The Devices & Printers showed the drive with a faulty driver.

A couple of restarts seemed to have solved that issue. Now the drive shows up in Devices & Printers and I see the drive in Disk Management, but is unallocated and not available.

I tried using testdisk, easy partition magic, and some other tools to see if I can recover the data, but none of these tools can see the hard drive.

When Disk Management comes up, a pop window asks me if I want to reinitialize the disk. I am wondering if I format it, maybe I can try to recover the data from the formatted drive.

What are you thoughts on this approach?

Thanks

your drive is probably failing and formatting it is a bad idea.
the best thing you can try is to clone it to another disk by using ddrescue.

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Data Recovery Pakistan

Thanks for this hint. Is it possible to clone it to a drive that is 2TB?

Also, will ddrescue find the drive, even if testdisk has not been able to?

no problem at all

Based on the questions asked, you may want to seek the assistance of a data recovery professional while the recovery is still somewhat simple, assuming that it is somewhat simple. If you go forward on your own and you mess up, it is likely going to affect the final outcome and price of a data recovery pro, should you then decide to use them.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

yes, it is possible.

DIY has its pros and cons, your data your choice.

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Data Recovery Pakistan

Give that it's a WD Elements drive, which likely has a native USB port rather than a SATA to USB bridge, DIY is not a good idea. There's very little you can do yourself without professional tools. As Luke said, right now it should be an affordable recovery that'll likely only cost a few hundred $$$. However if you keep trying stuff the condition of the drive will degrade and it'll cost thousands later to get it recovered. Or become impossible.

Remember, every time you power on a drive in that type of condition it's chances of recovery degrades.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

I'd recommend you contact W.Simon from this forum about it. Here's his website: http://www.agdi.info/

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company