Hi,

The worst possible situation. I was transferring some data from my camera into Photos (OSX App) when one of my kids pulled the lead out from the camera. Just after that they also managed to pull the lead out of the external HDD.

This really sent the computer into a tail spin and after connecting the cable the HDD became very slow at accessing the data on the disk.

Photos started to rebuild the library, but then I got bored of waiting for that (I think 90mins is enough) so I stopped the process and then started to think that the disk will probably have read/write errors.

I used Diskwarrior several times (no problems found) to rebuild the file structure, Disk utility (no problems found) and then decided to format the disk thinking that would recreate a new file structure (blank) and then I would be able to perform a data recovery.

I started with EaseUS and that kept finding read errors, so I then went over to Ontrack data recovery and that was going to take appx. 300 days to complete. At that point I sent it off to Kroll Ontrack DataRecovery for them to sort out.

They reported that was no physical or electromechanical issues and cloned my disk in order to be able to begin rebuilding the file structures.

They have come back and said there are too many read errors, so what can I do next?

The disk contained ALL the photos of my kids from birthing videos to their 7th birthdays, so I'm willing to commit a lot of time and effort into getting this back.

Please tell us hard drive model.

Can you paste what was said exactly? Often people misinterpret the message OR the message may be misleading.

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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

alex
contact some forum members from england like pcimage http://www.pcimage.co.uk,

It's a Western Digital Elements 3TB.

" ...the data structures had a great deal of errors and there were issues through the entire image ..."

Sort of strange... Best to go with another pro, pcimage is a great option.

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

Happy to take a look if you wanna send it in!

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

So the final report says that the structures have been rebuilt (390,000 =Good and 7,500 =partial) and from the sample .jpg 9/10 were recovered. So is this something that can be improved on by another? Or done myself with the correct software.

390,000 good vs 7,500 partial sounds pretty good if the disk is as badly degraded as they say.

If the bad sectors making the damaged ones damaged are unreadable due to media damage, then this is as good as it's gonna get.

If I was you, I'd be satisfied with 98% !

Out of interest, what are they charging you? We would have charged no more then £395+vat for this.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!