Need help recovering hard drive contents

[jennifer2010]

I have a 1.5TB Western Digital Passport external.

When I plug it in, it shows up in My Computer but says I need to format it before use.

I have Partition Wizard and did chkdsk 2 times.

Here's the last result of that:

And here's the image when I select partition recovery:

I also clicked on "Explore Partition" and ALL of my data is showing up! (Yay!) So that must mean it is still there to a certain extent. I just don't know how I'm going to recover it...

The partition recovery was at 0% for hours and that would take days on end. I don't know if that's the best option.

Recuva does not help and just sits on calculating time - like it can't search the drive.

Here's what TestDisk says:

Any ideas? I was considering purchasing Power Data Recovery but wasn't sure if I had a free alternative or if that would even work.

Thank you for the help!

- Jennifer

 

[XYMan]

That happened probably because you don't use the "eject this drive safely" feature. I sometimes does that to my 64GB USB but sometimes it works and it shows me the drive on different computers or in safe mode for whatever reason.

Here's what you do because Windows is too stupid. If you have a USB lying around, make a Linux Live USB, Google it, Linux is free and you can just install it on any device. Linux has the ability to browse through what's called "dead data" that is not recognized by most operating systems, it even tells you if there are bad sectors on a given hard drives and instantly kills them and never uses them, it doesn't give a *** like that. It'll automatically detect your drive and show you all your files, once you see them, just copy and paste them to your other Windows internal HDD and then boot back into Windows, format the external drive, and copy back the files from the HDD to the external one. Easy peasy.

Good luck.

 

[jennifer2010]

Genius idea XYMan.

I made a huge, huge mistake.

I didn't have enough space on my internal so I had to bring my other external out. Problem was, I couldn't find the power cable for it. Then I found out the power cable I was using for the broken drive is the one for the other external I want to back up the files onto. So I switched power cables, then looked for an hour for the other power cable.

I couldn't find and made the moronic mistake of trying to plug in a power adapter that had a higher voltage than what the external is for. After that, the computer stopped recognizing the drive I think I may have fried it.

Or, at least the power adapter part.

Here's what it looks like:
http://www.imagebam.com/image/dd24b1239497488

Not sure if that brown stuff is from the power adapter or not.

Now when I plug it into the comp via usb, it doesn't spin up, and just says "Initio Default Controller Installed Successfully"

I ordered a duplicate drive, a new enclosure and another USB adapter to see if I can somehow get it functioning again...

 

[XYMan]

Wow o.o
I wouldn't know what to do at this time. How important the data on it is? What you call mistakes could have been done by anyone, what's bothering me is that you didn't have the files backed up somewhere else too. For example, my music is backed up in 2 different hard drives, they're about my last 6 years of collecting and it would be a bummer to lose them, however, if i have some important files that connect to my work or college I would want to back them up in as many hard drives as I can and even upload them to a cloud storage service. Mega.co.nz is a great place, you get free 50GB, if you were able to recover any of it at this point immediately back them up to a cloud storage and don't do that mistake again. If you can live without the files I say you just forget about it and lets go out for a cup of coffee