And boy do I have troubles. The usb cord from my external hard drive became unplugged without safely removing it. It shows up as a raw drive in device manager. I have ran TestDisk and another Linux based recovery software and EaseUS Data recovery software to no avail. They all give me the same message of there is no recognizable file system on this drive. There are no weird sounds comming from the drive itself. But the data has to be there. I have baby pics on that drive and if I don't retrieve them, my wife is going to castrate me. Please someone help!

Clone it, sector by sector, to another drive, then work on the clone. In this way you will also find out whether the drive has any bad sectors.

Otherwise, I would examine a few important sectors with a disc editor such as DMDE, in particular sectors 0, 1, 2, 63, 2048.

Just to be certain that the drive is correctly identifying itself, how do HD Sentinel and UVCView detect the drive? UVCView talks to the USB-SATA bridge IC whereas HD Sentinel attempts to communicate with the drive behind the bridge.

http://dmde.com/
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_ID ... ew.x86.exe
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.