Hii

I have a maxtor basics 500 GB external hard drive which I bought about 4 years ago, but havent used it much for the past 1.5 years.
Recently I plugged in back in to use as a backup drive.
It was working fine however yesterday, when I tried to open the drive windows 7 indicated that I need to format the drive.
I tried both quick format and without the option of quick format.
Nothing worked. So I tried doing the formatting from "disk management". It didn’t work either. So I removed the volume. Now I cannot add it back. I can see that windows 7 still recognizes the drive





However the drive doesn’t show up as the external hard drive:



My question is

a)is it possible to recover the data?
b)if not how do I format the drive, given that windows 7 is not showing it in the list of drives?

First try to clone HDD with ddrescue to another HDD

Second if you can not see your files mount the HDD with Rstudio and do a search with this one. If you still do not find files then try to do raw recovery search.

But you said you tried to format the HDD and it did not work so lets hope it did not work but anyway you can do a raw recovery on this one

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Iorana Haraharaini

Hii..

Thanks for your reply...I can try that.. But maybe it will be faster to just format the drive. I dont need the files that urgently since they were just backup files.

So is there a way to format the drive under these conditions?

I tried HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool but it didnt work either:

Can you hear the drive spinup normally inside the casing?

Any abnormal clicking sounds?

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

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You have some errors on this HDD now. Shows as 1 LBA and 512 bytes. You will not be able to do this now. There is a way to refurbish this HDD but with out proper tools this one will not work. There could even be some issues in the SA of the HDD now but hard to tell from all this. I think this drive is beyond any DIY you can do to make it work again. You are in America but the guru for Maxtor is in Italy. I think maybe it is time to get a new drive for you and start again. Especially if it is reporting like this now. It needs to be refurbish from the looks of this report on LLF tools.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Hi, one suggestion. Try and create backup elsewhere as soon as possible. I have seen number of time where after backup failed, original source died soon after or vise versa.

@poehere..thanks for the advice..
@pcimage..I dont hear anything abnormal. The access light is on and everything is as normal.

One thing I forgot to mention before is that right before this problem happened, I was actually trying to check using the Window7 tools, whether there is any errors in the hard drive because I saw almost 100 GB missing from the drive, i.e. although the drive has a capacity of 500GB, it could only hold a maximum of 400GB of files. Also I tried using Seatools, the hard disk passed all tests such as Short/Long Generic etc. It didnt show any error.

Is there any particular reliable but affordable brand for backup external hard drives I should look for? I think for now 1TB of external drive storage would be fine.

Usually inside maxtor basics there is a Barracuda 7200.11 shit drive.
I think this is a bad sector issue, maybe also bad heads...