Recovery from External Hard Drive

I have read all the thread and I think that I am in crisis right now as there are no one that has the same problem as me and so I wonder if you can help me. Something has happen to both my pc and the external hard drive that backs up the data. Initially, there is something wrong with the pc and later it starts to freezes and the blue screen kept popping up. I have tried every way that Dell recommend to fix it but still it did not get better. As a result, I have to do a pc restore and hopefully that will take care of the problem.

However, after the restore, while I was trying to get the data from my external hard drive, it kept telling me to format the drive. As I know that reformat will erase all the data, i did not do it but to see if there is any solution out there. From the online forum, I realize someone else has the same problem and they said to do a conver drive-letter: /fs.ntfs and when I am trying to do it, it told me that I have a raw file and I do not know what I did with the partition magic, I did convert the file type from RAW to FAT32 (knowing from my other external that I need it to be in FAT32 instead of NTFS). By doing this, I think I deleted all the data on the hard drive. Does anyone know how I can recover the data? I have also tried testdisk but it does not work. Please help.:cry:cry

 

Right there's two options here, I'd try the first option I'll suggest first -

1) Take the hard drive out of the enclosure (Warning - may void warranty) and insert it into your pc and connect (usually via IDE as most external drives use this interface). It'll show up in My Computer and should display the data.

2) If this doesn't work, generally speaking you'll have to send the drive off to a data recovery company (if it's that vital to you then sometimes this can be the only option). It can be an expensive job, I know I was quoted last year £700 (around $1100 I think) to have everything recovered.

The problem I had last year was that the external drive was asking to have drivers installed everytime I tried to use it, took it out of the enclosure and connected it directly to the motherboard. It resulted in the hard drive enclosure being faulty so I picked one up off eBay cheap

 

Will this work if the data has been partition at least three times while trying to conver it back to FAT32 from RAW?

 

Well, if you've formatted it to recreate the partitions then essentially you've removed everything.

It's still worth trying option 1 to make sure the drive functions though.