Ext HDD not shown in mycomputer

Hi, I have a Seagate 1TB external HDD which was working fine till the other day. Today morning when I connected it to any computer or laptop(windows 7 OS), it is not displayed in My computer. However I can see that it is listed under Disk Management utility with the Unallocated (Black color) status When I tried to access the HDD, it pops up a window called as "Initialize Disk" (refer to the image I have attached). When I select MBR and click on OK....It says "The Media is write protected. I can use diskpart utlilty in command prompt to list this external HDD and format my HDD, however I have a very important data stored in it(Almost 250GB). I can see the HDD listed in Device manager, and uninstalled and reinstalled the HDD and USB drivers in Device Manager as well. I have also tried to access the drive in Linux platform, But the issue still exists. Please help me how can I access the Data without formatting my ext HDD. I have tried Test Disk program, but it could not find any ext HDD partitions for the first time. I tried searching for any partitions again, however it is showing me Read errors at almost every single cluster. I am confused about this :confused. Please suggest me steps to access my data safely... without formatting my ext HDD data. :major (If suggesting me a recovery program...Please suggest me a freeware one) THank you again....

 

See if PhotoRec, which is part of Testdisk,can recover your data. Remember not to save anything back to the external drive or your data will be gone for good. Good Luck.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

 

Hey Tgell, I have tried photorec as well, but it is showing read error and no partition found error after selecting the "file system type" (step 7) while trying to access data from my external HDD....

 

I would say the hard drive is toast or the USB controller. Can you try to connect the USB drive to another computer or port? If you still cannot access the drive, try removing it from the enclosure and attach it internally to another computer or use a USB adapter like this.

http://www.vantecusa.com/en/product/view_detail/266

You may want to try Power Data Recovery. It allows up to 1GB of data retrieval to see if the program works for you.

http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/

 

Hey Tgell, well when I attach it to any recovery program it shows, the size to be 2TB, where as the capacity is only 1TB. I performing the scan through Power data recovery software, let us see. I guess it has lost its partition table, which seems the only way for windows to access my data on the HDD. Cos when I used diskpart it showed that there is no partitions available. I have also connected the HDD to another laptop and it is still the same issue. It still shows me in Disk Management and not in MY computer and It give me the same Initialize disk error. Will let you know the status. Any more suggestions are welcome. Thank you again.

Any idea why I got the pop up (second image)?? :confused

 

Usually that pop-up can be due to a change in the registry. But, I would not be concerned about that until you can get the info off of the drive. If you lost the partition table, TestDisk is good at resolving that problem but as you said in the previous post, it did not work for you. Not sure why the capacity shows as 2TB when the drive is 1TB. Hopefully the Power Data Recovery Software can retrieve something.

 

tgell, any idea why I got read error at every single cluster, while analysing the Ext HDD(using testdisk)??

 

Still going thru the ext HDD scan using the power data recovery...I hope it will work.. Power cut sucks in here...

 

Sorry, but I think your hard drive has failed and the only way to get info would be very expensive, but keep scanning with power data recovery. It may find something.

If you cannot get anything off of the drive with Power Data Recovery, you might want to remove the drive from the enclosure and see if another computer can read it.