HI All,

Sorry for troubling everyone here who are relaxed!

I am in huge trouble, My 1.5 TB External Seagate HDD crashed. I logged onto my comp and found my hdd which was connected in afternoon was not showing up. Then saw that the HDD was showing up as Mass Storage, but not letting me to uninstall or safely eject.

So, I had to pull it out, tried on another machine where i usually used this hdd also was not detecting, the other desktop used to hang on my computer.

Then i tried the HDD on a friends PC after removing it from the seagate enclosure and used his another enclosure, there I was able to see my data & 2 partitions out of 3, but was hanging a bit, then same not able to remove safely. Had to unplug the USB cable.

Tried that same enclosure at home and it shows me to format all 3 drives when tried to click yes, the error message goes off. Then i found the hdd is coming and going in the device manager. So i removed the Hdd from the enclosure and plugged into my desktop which already has 250GB Seagate HDD. I checked if i could see the HDD in Bios and yes I was able to then tried to boot the comp and shows me a warning.

"Warning: A problem with the hard drive has been detected."

And computer boots, but cannot see the Hard Drive in My Computer, Device Manager.

The data is very important and have some Medical Reports & Medical pics of my Son on it who is ailing since birth with some rarest disease, which is not on the 2 drives which were shown earlier but the 3rd drive which has never shown up.

Please try and help me out of this huge trouble.

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Thanks and Regards,
Solvent20

If you have another 1.5TB drive, try putting them both in a PC and Using DMDE take a whole disk image. Ignore everything windows "says" just:

Install DMDE(free)
put both drives in
restart
go straight to DMDE and try and take a whole disk image(clone), saving the image to the other good 1.5TB.

after that completes, if it does successfully, you can run data recovery on the image.

If it fails, and data is important as you say, then advise to take to a DR company and let them diagnose and recover.

If i buy another portable 2tb will the clone work?

Cannot afford the DR cost. M not so well to do. But we'll have to if that is the last choice.

Thanks for the reply.

It will be ok. The new (destination) drive should be either same or bigger than the old (source ) drive

DIY has its risks, and the situation can become worse than what it is now making recovery costlier and difficult.
So if data is really important, do not attempt DIY procedures and contact pro near you.
In the current situation, cost of recovery should not be too high.

Risks like what in DIY.

Can i get the hdd formatted and repaired by a professional and then recover the data myself using a software. I have stellar data recovery software purchased.

Thanks and Regards,
Solvent20

No , recovery does not happen this way.

Your drive may be in its last stages of working before it completely fails and then the cost of recovery will be very high.
Your DIY attempts will push the drive to that stage.
Hence if your data is very important, do not try to power on the drive , just hoping that it may ,just by sheer luck, start working..

your best DIY option was given by HaQue, if you want to take that route .

It sounds like the drive has numerous bad sectors. IMHO the best DIY approach would be to clone the drive, sector by sector, using a tool (eg ddrescue) that understands how to work around bad media.

Depending on your skill, you could greatly improve your chances by accessing the drive's serial terminal port and disabling reallocation and retries. The HDD Oracle forum has lots of information on how to go about this.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Hi solvent20,

If your data is important the best is that you go to a local Pro

i otherwise, you can try HaQue way is a good way, but is not 100% sure. Like sathyan says:
The new (destination) drive should be either same or bigger than the old (source ) drive. and destination drive would be in good condition.

If you can clone, in destination drive you must use data recovery soft like stellar.