this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
8 points (90.0% liked)

techsupport

2745 readers
1 users here now

The Lemmy community will help you with your tech problems and questions about anything here. Do not be shy, we will try to help you.

If something works or if you find a solution to your problem let us know it will be greatly apreciated.

Rules: instance rules + stay on topic

Partnered communities:

You Should Know

Reddit

Software gore

Recommendations

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
8
help recover data from defective harddisk (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
9 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hi,

I have a Western digital 'WD My Passport' external usb harddisk and it has become defective in some way.

When I connect it to windows I've managed to get access to it before, but it was really sluggush to navigate in and it would fail to open certain folders and files. Now I cannot get windows to recognize it al all. It powers on and windows says something like 'setting up deveice', but nothing more happens.

If I open windows 'disk management' the drive shows up as 'Disk 1', 'Unknown', 'Not initialized'.

I wes reccomended a tool called Recuva (https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva), but since windows doesn't recognize the disk I cannot tell the tool where to look for files to recover.

I've also tried a tool called TestDisk (https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download), but it doesn't see the drive.

Can anyone help please? :)

Thanks

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] thericofactor 3 points 3 days ago

I had one if these not work because the usb port it was connected to didn't provide enough power. Try connecting it to an externality powered USB hub if you can.

If it's really broken I would open it up and connect it directly to an SATA port. If I remember correctly, inside is just a USB to SATA converter and a pretty standard drive.