i m new to HDD recover, really hope someone can point me to the right direction to fix my USB external drive. what happen was someone was talking by my table and knocked out the USB cable while i was writing files to the drive. when i plug the drive back to the PC. it's saying drive need to be format. i have tryed to use Zar 8.3 it's show there is data on the drive. but Zar crashed at 99% finish reading the drive and it exit out.

thx !!!

Hi,

Try another recovery application like R-Studio for example.

do i need to clone the drive for a backup. i mean is there a chance i will mess up the drive even more ?

Definitely a chance with any attempt you could mess it up more, especially since the drive was dropped, possible hardware issues. Best DIY (if you are willing to risk the data) would be to make an image / clone of the drive with a program like ddrescue, then attempt the recovery on the cloned drive.

the drive wasn't droped, just someone pass by and disconnected the USB cable while writing data to the drive. i have a friend that have R-studio verion 3, will that work ? or i should just try with the newest verion ? i have been doing some research. is there a chance that only the file table is mess up ? in that case is it more easyer to recover so i don't have to recover the whole drive ? thx alot for your reply !!!

Sorry, long day, completely misread. Yeah I would try out R-Studio and see how that works.

i have done some recearch and i find out about sysresccd which is a live CD with ddrescue. i m able to format brand new harddrive under NTFS and able to mount the NTFS to my linux box. i guess i have to say lucky me, when i plug in the drive that i need to recover and mount it to the linux box. i m able to see all the file on the disk. but some special characters files (chinese files name) it show ???????.mp3 and i m unable to copy them to my backup drive. also there is some files they r not special characters but they maybe long file name. when i try to copy those files it say input/output error. the drive is fat32. i did it with "mount -t vfat" now i m thinking if vfat support fat32 or it's only fat16 ?

I would suggest that you clone your drive firdt on this one. If it is asking to be formatted there is some issue on this one. clone it, run Rstudio or another application like get data back for FAT or NTSF on this one. Once you have back your data on it then you can format your original usb drive and put your data back on it. I would not run too many DR recovery programs on your original drive it is better to run all on a cloned drive.

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Iorana Haraharaini