I have a 1 TB WD Passport USB external drive that I dropped. I've spent 3 days now searching forums and trying different data recovery applications in an attempt to recover my photos and music. When I plug it into my Win7 laptop, it shows up in Device Manager but is not automatically mapped; Disk Management identifies it as having a RAW File System. Windows diagnostics say it is "Healthy" and "working properly" but it also can't read it (I've tried a couple of things through Windows, including running chkdsk from an elevated command prompt). I've also looked at the drive on a machine running Ubuntu--no joy--and a Mac--also no joy. Both seemed to see the drive, but didn't recognize it or didn't see any data on it.
None of the disk recovery packages I've tried has been able to do anything with it--some of them don't see it, as a partition but not a drive, some see it but can't touch it. Testdisk came closest--it seemed like it was looking at the disk, but it just said "Read error at..." as it counted through the sectors. I stopped it before it got too far along.
I haven't been able to attach the drive directly to a computer--I don't see any ports on the drive that match up to any of the cables in the machines.
So 2 things I'm considering before I have to face the decision about dropping a grand to get it recovered professionally--I read in one forum a recommendation to format a hard drive, then use a data recovery program that is designed to recover data from a formatted drive. That kind of seems logical, but also very scary. There is also a program called SpinRite that seems to work at a deeper level than the other programs and runs on FreeDOS, but it looks like I'd have to find special DOS USB drivers if I can't figure out how to plug the drive directly into the computer.
Any thoughts or recommendations at this point would be extremely welcome.
None of the disk recovery packages I've tried has been able to do anything with it--some of them don't see it, as a partition but not a drive, some see it but can't touch it. Testdisk came closest--it seemed like it was looking at the disk, but it just said "Read error at..." as it counted through the sectors. I stopped it before it got too far along.
I haven't been able to attach the drive directly to a computer--I don't see any ports on the drive that match up to any of the cables in the machines.
So 2 things I'm considering before I have to face the decision about dropping a grand to get it recovered professionally--I read in one forum a recommendation to format a hard drive, then use a data recovery program that is designed to recover data from a formatted drive. That kind of seems logical, but also very scary. There is also a program called SpinRite that seems to work at a deeper level than the other programs and runs on FreeDOS, but it looks like I'd have to find special DOS USB drivers if I can't figure out how to plug the drive directly into the computer.
Any thoughts or recommendations at this point would be extremely welcome.