Free External Hard Drive Data Recovery - Recover files from Internal&External HDD

Background

My Toshiba 1TB external hard drive wont show up in the computer explorer. I disconnect it from computer and then reconnect, still no response. It is a backup disk that I used for saving most of important personal information but now it is corrupted. Is there anything I could do to get the inside data out of the disk when it is not working?

There are various types of disk damage or data loss, some are within the power of recovery by a DIY tool, some can only be repaired by data recovery professionals. Here in this article we will share you the guide of the following.

Hard Disk damage&error that data can be recovered

Internal or external hard drive corruption or data erasing can be repaired under such circumstances.

1. external hard disk suddenly became corrupted or no longer working (complicated)
2. external hard disk file system became RAW, io device error, blank hard drive, disk structure corrupted
3. external disk HDD warns not formatted and ask for format
4. external HDD cannot be recognized by PC
5. reformatted external disk by mistake; repartitioned disk; software failure; virus attack...
6. external hd cannot be formatted and chkdsk said not available for raw drives
7. erased files on hard disk by mistake and other logical errors...

The above disk problems&errors that makes it no longer possible for you to access the inside data or when you deleted data by mistake, formatted disk by accident, or your disk just don't work any more, you may try the following free disk recovery tool to help for a hard drive recovery.

Types and Brands of Internal/External Hard Drive

PATA (IDE, EIDE)
SATA, SCSI, SAS, Fibre Channel
USB, Firewire, eSATA external/portable hard disk drives
PCMCIA or others

Hard disk of Fujitsu®Hitachi GST®HP®NetApp™Samsung®Seagate®Toshiba®Western Digital® and others...

Hard disk recovery guide: recover data from external disk -required

You may ignore this step if there are no important files inside of the hard disk.

Step1. Download hard drive recovery tool, Connect your external hard disk to PC, Install, run the program and choose a proper mode to start.

Step2. Choose the your hard drive to start recovery.

Step3. Save files from your hard drive to another disk to avoid data overwritten.

External USB drive recovery using cmd/freeware

Warning, do not use cmd diskpart or chkdsk or any other operations before data were recovered since this is overwriting or making changings that would bring data inside of hard drive to be corrupted.

Part 1: Video - Repair damaged hard disk using chkdsk

Step 1: when you are sure there are no important data inside of the portable disk, then go ahead with the cmd to repair disk if it is damaged. Open CMD.

Step 2: Click OK, and then in the cmd, type "chkdsk /x F:" and enter.

If this cmd does not work for you, you may try error checking with a third party freeware IM-Magic Partition Resizer that can let you find bad blocks and repair damaged disk.

Part 2 - Repair damaged disk using freeware

Step 1: Download, install freeware Partition Resizer, connect your portable disk to pc and run it. Right click the external disk, select 'Check Partition'

Warning: repair disk with freeware could also bring damage to the inside data if you did not recovered them ahead of time.

Step 2: confirm to check and repair damaged disk

External Hard Drive Damage Solutions - Case study

Resolution: run iCare Data Recovery to get data out of seagate external. And then repair it with a disk repair tool - Partition Resizer.

Resolution: A physcial damage to the disk may just happen to it. The only solution is to ask for a data recovery professional to recover inside data manually. Most software or tools wont work for this case of physical damage.

Resolution: A mistaken reformatting on hard drive can be easily recovered. Just download the format recovery tool, connect your disk to PC and run for a recovery.

Just do not save restored data onto the same disk, you need to prepare another disk for data saving to avoid damage.

Resolution: Recover inside data at first, if you do not care about the inside data and just want to make it work, you may try the cmd but not chkdsk to repair it. The cmd format command line.

Step 1: open cmd by using "Windows+R"

Step 2: do not use the chkdsk but use another cmd

Type: format l:/fs:ntfs and enter (replace l with your drive letter )

Repair corrupted external hard drive with CMD

Or you may try the following steps

Clean disk and then format it to be ntfs/fat32

Watch a video to format hard disk fat32/ntfs using cmd

Also read: how to fix can't format hard disk

More knowledge about external hard drive

Below are some possible reasons for external hard disk error:

• External disk infected with virus, spyware or Trojan, etc.
• External hard disk has bad sectors, which disables you to access files on the disk.
• External disk is damaged because of unexpected system shutdown, improper operation or application failure.

External hard disk is different from hard disk because it works as an external device to store or transfer data. You don’t need to install external hard disk to your computer but you only need to connect it to your computer through a USB cable to write or transfer a large amount of data, so people consider external hard disk as a convenient and large device for data storage and transferring. Along with more and more people like to use external hard disk due to its convenience and large capacities, they also find an unavoidable problem on external hard disk – data loss.

Rescue data from external disk hdd drive after it crashed

If you cannot afford to lose any data from your external hard disk, you can employ iCare Data Recovery Pro which provides useful solution to solve your problem like external hard disk format recovery, external hard disk deleted file recovery, external hard disk not formatted or external hard disk RAW file system, etc. As a data restoration tool, iCare Data Recovery Pro can even recover data from external hard disk when it is not recognized or detected by computer. This data recovery software can quickly scan the external hard disk and get back lost files in batch, so it is an effective and efficient data recovery tool.

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