I have a 3tb Seagate drive that was partitioned as a single drive (my D: drive) and suddenly vanished from Windows. Checking with Disk Manager, it now shows as 'Unallocated". All the programs I've used to check the drive don't report any errors (i.e. SMART, etc.), so I'm stumped on what happened. The complete explanation of what I've tried so far is below, but this once in my life I seriously want to recover the data on it, which, unfortunately, I hadn't yet backed up (my bad on that one.)
So far I've tried several different recovery tools with no success (e.g. Disk Drill, Aomei Partition Assistant, Stellar Data Recovery, Recovery It, and maybe one or two others). Each one sees the drive and identifies its model number and will start scanning. But then each of them just runs for hours, even overnight, and never shows more than zero overall progress counting either sectors or blocks or whatever. It does appear that they're working, but they go so slowly that in two instances where they gave an approximate time remaining (in hours) it would have been two years! Disk Drill was the only one that showed it was finding Bad Blocks as it counted up slowly, but even it was apparently going to take thousands of hours to finish. Seagate support was kind enough to send me one of their tools to try to recover it, and before it started it looked like it estimated maybe five hours to complete. But it's been running now over five hours and still shows 0% overall progress, only on Phase 1 of 4, with 0 files found. Only the elapsed time keeps counting up.
So my question is whether I'm doing something wrong using these programs, or if anyone knows something that will work. I'd love to know what could so affect a drive so completely that recovery programs can't even read it well enough to make any progress or find anything.
Since several of the disk checking tool don't show errors with the drive, I'm not sure what to think or even try next. If there's no option to recover this myself, I'd also be interested in suggestions for highly recommended data recovery companies (ones I might be able to afford for a 3Tb drive.) Thanks, JTT
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