USB 1TB external Harddrive, is my backup drive. Did it just die?

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deadstar99

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Dec 11, 2011
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USB 1TB Harddrive, is my backup drive. I have installed windows on a new SSD and am loving it. I went today to get some information off of it, and upon turning it on (for the first time with this system), instead of it asking to open folder to view files, it said it must be formatted before it can be used. This would wipe everything on the drive no?? When I open the drive up in my computer it says it is empty. Did my external drive just die on me at the worst possible time?????
 
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popatim
You do not want to format the drive.

You biggest mistake, not to pick on you but rather to educate, was in thinking of the drive as a backup. A backup copy is an extra copy. Once that drive held your ONLY copy of data - it ceased being a backup. So when you know you will be putting yourself int hat situation, you make a backup first and verify it. If it happens otherwise (accident, drive failure...) your first priority is to make another backup.

Now that we have that out of the way. How important is the data?
So important that you would pay big money to not lose it then you might consider sending it out for recovery because there is always a chance that doing it yourself could cause more damage or even lose any chance of even...
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Xyos

Xyos

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Oct 5, 2009
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It's possible, you can use diskmgmt.msc (type that in windows search bar) to initialize and label the drive if windows wont do it. Unfortunately it does sound like it might be corrupt. You can try drive recovery software or a company to recover the data if its very important.
 
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popatim

popatim

Titan
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Dec 2, 2009
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You do not want to format the drive.

You biggest mistake, not to pick on you but rather to educate, was in thinking of the drive as a backup. A backup copy is an extra copy. Once that drive held your ONLY copy of data - it ceased being a backup. So when you know you will be putting yourself int hat situation, you make a backup first and verify it. If it happens otherwise (accident, drive failure...) your first priority is to make another backup.

Now that we have that out of the way. How important is the data?
So important that you would pay big money to not lose it then you might consider sending it out for recovery because there is always a chance that doing it yourself could cause more damage or even lose any chance of even professionals getting it back.

If you still want to attempt it yourself, do you have another drive to recover files to or one large enough to hold an image of this drive as well?
My workflow would be 1st to image the drive to a file.
Next I would run Testdisk and attempt to recover the partition.
If that fails I would use testdisk again to recover the files.
- TestDisk is like a dos program, you enter everything by commands. If you wanted something more windows like then try Recuva or photorec. But in all cases remember that you recover to another drive so as not to overwrite data on this one.

TestDisk guide: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step (the download link is in the left pane as is PhotoRec)
Recuva : https://www.piriform.com/recuva
 
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