Corrupted USB hard drive

[Goi]

Hi,

I have a USB hard drive that somehow got corrupted, and doesn't show up on Windows Explorer when I connect it. On Disk Manager, it shows up as an uninitialized drive. Is there any way I can recover the file system, or, failing which, the files?

 

[HutchinsonJC]

I've had a few usb drives with similar problems. I've used GetDataBack! to get all the files off of one drive, but this drive did show up in windows explorer. It just fussed that it needed to be formatted and I knew there was stuff on it.

Anyway, GetDataBack! was kinda fun to play with. Costs like 80 bucks, though.

 

[PliotronX]

Its a scary thought that initializing it will wipe everything but it doesn't. More than likely once it is initialized it will show as a raw partition. There is a tool called Testdisk that can recover the partition table like nothing happened and I have had good luck with it but YMMV.

 

[Goi]

Its a scary thought that initializing it will wipe everything but it doesn't. More than likely once it is initialized it will show as a raw partition. There is a tool called Testdisk that can recover the partition table like nothing happened and I have had good luck with it but YMMV.

I actually have Testdisk from recovering another corrupted drive but it wasn't able to recover everything, only a small percentage of the files, and many were incomplete and had no file information.

 

[PliotronX]

I think you are confusing file recovery with partition recovery. This very symptom is a result of the partition table being lost and I performed this very action three months ago on a USB hard drive. Like I said, it found the partition and rebuilt it in the blink of an eye with even the name of the partition. File recovery when the partition table is lost is always dicey no matter the recovery software because you may end up with a single folder full of randomly named documents and images.

 

[Ankur Saxena]

You can recover all your data using data recovery software

 

[Goi]

I think you are confusing file recovery with partition recovery. This very symptom is a result of the partition table being lost and I performed this very action three months ago on a USB hard drive. Like I said, it found the partition and rebuilt it in the blink of an eye with even the name of the partition. File recovery when the partition table is lost is always dicey no matter the recovery software because you may end up with a single folder full of randomly named documents and images.

Oh yes, I think I used photorec in the other case.

In any case, I just tried testdisk on the drive, and even after a deep scan it wasn't able to find any partitions to recover 🙁

 

[Goi]

When initializing a 2TB Seagate external USB drive, should I be using MBR or GPT? I'm guessing MBR since it's still within the 2TB limit, and it's only 1 partition?