External hard drive problem

[nabby68]

I have a 500gb portable USB hard drive which until last week was running fine and had about 450gb worth of data on it. A couPle of times I had problems with the USB connection on the drive not quite connecting when it was moved so therefore on numerous occasions I had to unplug the drive and recconect which overtime I am assuming has caused issues. So eventually the drive became unrecognisable in windows explorer so I ran chkdsk and it found a few errors and fixed them. Now the drive shows up in win explorer but only shows 30gb of data which I am unable to access when I double click to open the drive windows doesn't show any data at all. I opened the drive in disk management utility and it shows 450gb full which was on it. I have tried data recovery programme and have recovered the 35gb of data shown in windows explorer. Can I recover the test of my data? My O/S is Windows 7
Thanks

 

[bavman]

Take apart the harddrive and plug the drive straight into a desk top. I've seen a lot of external harddrive enclosures fail, but it might just be a bad drive. Worth a try though

 

[nabby68]

Thanks bavman. Have already done that. Made no difference.

 

[rgd1101]

Try different recovery program. Here is a good list in
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd
under "Recovery Tools"

Or may need to go to the professional.

 

[nabby68]

Thanks. That's a great list of useful tools. Are they all free and what would be the best recovery tool?