I'm having a problem with one of my externals. It read and showed my custom name a few days ago, but now it seems totally locked. Displays "Local Disk (X" and will not show my files at all, when I right click to see the space usage, both used and total read 0. My HDD is an external WD 500GB SATA. I had over 300GB of data stored on there, any way I could get it back? Right about now I'm willing to scrap the whole thing just to get my data back... Model: WD5000H1U-00
I think that's where I went wrong. My girlfriend dropped it and the case broke open. I tried just installing the drive which worked for about... 30 minutes, then it just stopped reading. I tried unplugging, plugging back in, all sorts of things, now that I have it back together it's still doing the same exact thing. I'm confused.
You can slave that drive and use the free "testdisk" software to recover the data from it. Testdisk has an addon called "photorec" which can recover data from corrupt hard drives. As long as the drive is not to severely damaged it can recover data. But if you are able to recover the data, the drive should be consider "unreliable" since it was dropped and no longer used for storage of valuable data.
Well, tried to slave it, now the drive isn't detecting at all. I see it in the bios but it's just a blank space, no name at all. Everything of course reads 0. It does spin up but powers back down (I think, I don't feel it spinning anymore and I put my hand on it). I'm just about done with it... Unless there is something I can do myself, I think I may need to take it to a data recovery center. How much do they usually cost?
