External hard drive problems

[Emperus]

Hello guys. Am in a spot of bother now. I have a Buffalo 500 GB external hard drive which is experiencing problems. The windows explorer (my OS is windows 7 ultimate 64 bit) detects the drive perfectly and even shows the amount of free filled space accurately. However, when I open the drive, it shows empty. CHKDSK reports errors but cannot correct them. The drive is FAT 32. So now am interested in knowing if the data can be recovered. If yes then which is the best recovery software that comes with the best data recovery reputation.

 

[shin0bi272]

I found this review site if you wanted to see a few laid out for you
http://data-recovery-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

 

[FreeDataRecovery]

The chances are good that your data is recoverable. Sounds like the drive may have bad sectors which is a common problem. I frequently recover data from drives like you've described using a remote access method.

If you want to try and do the recovery yourself one of the better tools for this is R-Studio http://www.r-studio.com/

 

[omnisome]

The chances are good that your data is recoverable. Sounds like the drive may have bad sectors which is a common problem. I frequently recover data from drives like you've described using a remote access method.

If you want to try and do the recovery yourself one of the better tools for this is R-Studio http://www.r-studio.com/

Need a moderator here.

 

[math1337]

I've had a good experience with photorec, and it's completely free and open source, so there's no harm in trying it.

 

[Emperus]

Thank you all for your time and replies.. Guess I will try with the FREE solutions first and if that does not work out, will resort to more drastic measures and/or PAID stuff.. Will return back ASAP with the results..

 

[Emperus]

Ok.. I guess it was not ASAP but am back with the results.. Thank you all for your suggestions.. I tried most of the above mentioned softwares and methods.. Photorec is the one which got me impressed.. It does not has an easy interface but works effectively and fast.. Definitely did the trick for me.. Thanks to all of you again..

 

[Emperus]

Best answer selected by Emperus.