Hello guys. I've had my Toshiba external 3TB HDD for a good few years now, its worked fine up until now. Its been in storage as I've just moved house. The blue light at the front of the HDD comes on when I plug the power in, and it also makes the sound when I plug it in the usb to my pc (Win 7). But it does not show up in my computer. It shows up in my devices and says that the latest driver is installed. I've tried reassigning the drive letter, but that's not the case here.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated as I have a lot of data on there

How important is the data stored on the drive? Does the drive spin up? Does it make any scratching clicking noises? When it is really important you should give it to an expert.

Before making any steps further please be sure an patient...

1. Remove carefully the enclosure and inside it will be a internal HD with SATA port

2. Download a Knoppix and boot from it... (or some linux boot cd) / Windows is not very friendly to the connected drives... There could be a physical issue

3. Connect the Toshiba HD to an SATA Port an the boot from the CD / please check the boot process before not that windows is hammering the drive...

4. with ddrescue you could make an image of the drive... / it is not good working directly on the drive you want to be recovered.

Maybe this list is not complete... jus a fast help

Greetings

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Fachwerkstatt für Data Recovery / Datenrettung in Stuttgart - Riedel IT - Ameisenbergstraße 30 - 70188 Stuttgart

Does the drive spin up?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I believe the drive spins up, yes. The light stays blue, no flashes or anything. Ive tried reinstating the drivers, different USB ports, tried it on my laptop but nothing works. It still makes the sound when plugged in the USB and shows up in the device manager, but not in my computer

As BenDataRecovery has already suggested, you should try connecting the drive to a SATA port on your motherboard.

Otherwise, you could check whether the drive appears in CrystalDiskInfo:
http://crystalmark.info/software/Crysta ... dex-e.html

Also, you could examine the USB info via UVCView or USBDeview:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html
http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/b/a/eba1050f-a31d-436b-9281-92cdfeae4b45/UVCView.x64.exe
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thank you for the suggestions, I'll try them once I'm home and post my progress

I've managed to open the drive up and connected it straight to the motherboard, but its now asking me to format it. Is there anyway round this to get my files from the HDD back or do I have to format it? Sorry, I know a bit about computers but I'm not very clued up about some things

Please DON'T format your drive. Formatting is data destructive.

I suspect that your drive's external enclosure is configured with 4KB sector sizes. When you remove such a drive from its enclosure, you expose its native 512e sectoring and render the file system inaccessible. Essentially you end up with a 4Kn file system on a 512e physical drive.

Can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Ive only just read your message fzabkar. I managed to get all of my data off the hard drive using software called ZAR X thank god! I then decided to format it after I had the data safe on another drive, thinking that it would start working again, but its still not reading as a external drive.