Bad Sectors on Ext Hard Drive, what to do now?

emeseye

Honorable
Apr 25, 2012
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My WD External Hard Drive "contains file system errors that Windows cannot fix." "Format Disk" The Western Digital scan says "too many bad sectors". I did not format disk, all I want to do is retrieve my files, don't need to save drive. Please, what is the next thing I should do? What recovery software would you recommend? I don't want to do any further damage. Thanks for any advice....
 
There is a lot of good, free recovery software. The two mentioned most frequently here are Recuva and EASEUS partition recover. EASEUS also has a data recovery, but it's not free.

No decent recovery software will further damage your drive, unless the drive's problem is physical and just moving the heads to read makes it worse.

One common practice, if you have a desktop system and are comfortable with hardware, is to remove the external drive chassis from the equation by removing the drive from it and connecting the drive directly to the motherboard controller port.

Good luck to you.

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And may I suggest that, if you don't currently do backups, in the future you have two copies of everything that is important to you, just in case of such a problem.