I recently set up a rather powerful Desktop computer, with the intent of having it be my workhorse, but also serving as a media server for my music, movies, and TV shows until I set up an actual server. In order to get all media in one place I copied and moved them over from old computer hard drives that were no longer in use, my laptops, etc. onto one centralized 4TB external hard drive. My goal was to get rid of any duplicate items between sources and set up a organized folder structure I could follow on all my computers.
I know I should have backed it all up as soon as it was all together, but previous times when I've had hard drive issues, even if I couldn't access it on Windows, I could always boot up with a Ubuntu install disc and recover the files, so I figured that if anything went wrong, I could solve it.
As you can no doubt guess from the thread title, things have gone wrong beyond my level of knowledge. At first I noticed it was getting slower, even though it was plugged in via a USB 3.0 cable. Soon, I couldn't delete stuff that was in the Recycle Bin that was located on the drive.
Finally, I decided to remove the drive from the casing, and plug it into my computer directly by the SATA ports. As soon as I did this, however, I got nothing. My Computer shows the drive:
My Computer
One of the first things I read online was to try to give the drive another drive letter. I tried this two different ways. First through Disk Management where I named it drive Z, and then through command line diskpart where I named it Y. Both times, the drive letter changed, but I was told that to use the drive I'd have to format it. Obviously this is not an option. (Well, not yet.)
However, while pursuing this angle, I noticed something else troubling. Disk Management shows the drive having three partitions, two empty, and one RAW, but healthy.
DIsk Management
I continued browsing online until I found a program called Testdisk. I ran it, and I got an error.
Testdisk results
I hope someone can help me because I really don't want to lose all of my data. Not backing it up was a stupid move on my end. I know this, but I didn't plan on having it crap out so quickly. The drive is pretty new and hasn't seen much use before this past week.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
I know I should have backed it all up as soon as it was all together, but previous times when I've had hard drive issues, even if I couldn't access it on Windows, I could always boot up with a Ubuntu install disc and recover the files, so I figured that if anything went wrong, I could solve it.
As you can no doubt guess from the thread title, things have gone wrong beyond my level of knowledge. At first I noticed it was getting slower, even though it was plugged in via a USB 3.0 cable. Soon, I couldn't delete stuff that was in the Recycle Bin that was located on the drive.
Finally, I decided to remove the drive from the casing, and plug it into my computer directly by the SATA ports. As soon as I did this, however, I got nothing. My Computer shows the drive:
My Computer
One of the first things I read online was to try to give the drive another drive letter. I tried this two different ways. First through Disk Management where I named it drive Z, and then through command line diskpart where I named it Y. Both times, the drive letter changed, but I was told that to use the drive I'd have to format it. Obviously this is not an option. (Well, not yet.)
However, while pursuing this angle, I noticed something else troubling. Disk Management shows the drive having three partitions, two empty, and one RAW, but healthy.
DIsk Management
I continued browsing online until I found a program called Testdisk. I ran it, and I got an error.
Testdisk results
I hope someone can help me because I really don't want to lose all of my data. Not backing it up was a stupid move on my end. I know this, but I didn't plan on having it crap out so quickly. The drive is pretty new and hasn't seen much use before this past week.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
I strongly recommend testing the drive with WD's Data LifeGuard Diagnostics tool to check up on the health and S.M.A.R.T. status. It will be really helpful if you could share a screenshot of that as well. In order to determine the SMART status, you'd need to run the quick and the extended test. Here's a link to the software: 
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