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Hard drive not showing up in explorer but does in computer management

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You just stated that the USB to SATA host device does not detect the hard drive. In order for that to happen, there would either need to be a fault with the I/O chip on the host device, or the controller on the hard drive has issues. I have seen hard drive controllers cause GPT corruption, which was a common flaw with the 7200.11 series from Seagate. Some SATA controllers will see a hard drive and not come back with a partition table, and some will not see the hard drive at all.
 
Let me make this clear as mud: No one is going to guarantee the integrity of your data. Your data is your data and yours alone. I'm not going to be diplomatic about that. Generally hard disk controllers are not replaced in an RMA situation. You would get a re-certified hard drive in return for your defective hard drive. If you wanted to be creative, you can find someone that has the exact same hard drive with the exact same firmware and attempt to do a swap of the controller boards. A disk that has bad sectors would be a perfect candidate for it.

Other that that, you are SOL.
 
What size is the drive? Is it GPT because of being larger than 2TB? If so, that could be an issue with some USB to SATA converters not handling it, without anything being wrong with the controller.
 
I tried the RAW method that John Connor suggested and it doesn't see the drive or at least all of it, it is a 2TB drive with all that space partitioned to it.
 
Onceler said:
GPT fdisk asks for a filename or device name or press enter to exit
I don't know what to tell it
Click to expand...

For the Windows version try \\.\physicaldriveX, where X is the disk number shown in disk management.

For Linux it will probably be something like /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, etc.
 
The hard drive now shows up as unallocated space in storage.
I tried EaseUS using the fast option it searched but said no partitions were found so I started again with a complete scan which I suspect will be running all night at least.
Any more ideas in case this does not work?
Thank you all.
 
I doubt the full scan will find anything the quick scan doesn't because of the encryption.

What does GPT fdisk say when you give it the \\.\physicaldriveX path or just the number from disk management?
 
your right the complete scan didn't find anything
GPT fdisk when given \\.\physicaldrive1 nothing and exits
when given \\.\1 it says something way to fast to read then exits
 
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It sounds like not only is the primary GPT gone, but it isn't finding the backup either. No idea where to go from there
 
How do I use the bitlocker recovery tool if I don't even have a drive letter?
It seems to be the one I need but I don't know how to do it without a drive letter.
 
If you really need that data back I would probably invest in a data recovery service. Maybe they can recover the data and establish a drive letter to use the Bitlocker recovery tool.
 
Did you try using dd_rescue? You mentioned that you would, but then didn't give any indication of whether you did, or what happened.
 
IMHO the op needs to come to terms with what has happened to his drive. This is exactly why you back up what is important to you no matter what you run. I'm backing up important stuff as I type this because you just never know.
 
Did you try using the EaseUS tool for rebuilding the partition table? They have full instructions on their website, halfway down the page in the link that John Conner gave you. Ignore the top half of the page, you already tried that.
 
it might also help if you could hexdump the MBR and show it to someone that knows how to read these things. You could also hexdump the GPT and backup GPT, and see if there are discrepancies, or if the data is completely done.

Potentially the drive may also have suffered a controller failure, and reports false data. What does SMART tell you?
I usually use the system rescue cd linux "distribution" to attempt such fixes. It's not exactly user friendly, but gives you almost all the tools you could ever need, including driver error logging, smart, hexdump, fdisk, dd_rescue und ddrescue...
It will not be able to recover the actual data, due to the encryption, but it should be able to determine what's left of the pools, how the MBR looks, and whether any hardware errors get thrown.
 
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