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MemphisFlash
Posts: 2126
Joined: Fri May 16, 2014 10:12 pm
Location: Leicester

Can anyone suggest any good software to recover an external drive that does not show up in windows 10.
I have lost all my colourful excel sheets and stats data from many years.
It is a 2TB seagate drive.
I fear i may have to format the drive (once i can see it) and all data will be lost forever.
Is there any way i can recover the drive, and the corresponding data?

Thanks

Tom
Archery1969
Posts: 3193
Joined: Thu Oct 24, 2019 8:25 am
Location: Newport

Hi Memphis,

All depends how much you value the data I guess.

My company have used the following services before but it was not cheap to say the least. Around £500 per day. But they give you a quote for the job first.

https://recover-my-data.co.uk/

Best of luck,
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Euler
Posts: 24701
Joined: Wed Nov 10, 2010 1:39 pm
Location: Bet Angel HQ

Hinsight is a wonderful thing, but I back up my data to another drive and online. I lost some data once and it hurt so much I never wanted to revisit that place.

There are a lot of professional recovery services you could probably use.
sniffer66
Posts: 1666
Joined: Thu May 02, 2019 8:37 am

Was going to suggest an external recovery company. We've used them at work previously with decent success

I know the horse has bolted but something like a 100gb Google Drive account with auto sync to your data for about £1.50 pm would be useful. For anything really critical look at a mirrored RAID drive. In fact, both, in case your house burns down....
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Tuco
Posts: 727
Joined: Wed Apr 15, 2009 1:43 pm

I clone my internal and external drives for this very reason - mechanical hard drives can and do fail, SSD's less so.

I would suggest you try everything before using a recovery specialist as they're not chaep - use another PC/laptop to see if it is visible...

Does the external HDD power up? Do you use an external HDD docking station to put the bare Seagate 2TB in? (that's what I do). If so, try another docking station, another power supply etc. If it's in it's own housing, break open the housing and try the bare HDD in an external docking station, etc.

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT FORMAT THE 2TB SEAGATE HDD AS THAT WILL BE FINAL!
Trader Pat
Posts: 4327
Joined: Tue Oct 25, 2016 12:50 pm

Seagate offer 3 years free data recovery on some of their drives so if your drive is in warranty they might be able to recover it for you depending on the type of drive.

https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/products/ ... -recovery/
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MemphisFlash
Posts: 2126
Joined: Fri May 16, 2014 10:12 pm
Location: Leicester

the drive still whirs into action, just not recognised by the operating system.
have tried different USB ports, different cables. It doesn't sound like it has a "click"
so i am hopeful it is not permanent.
Trader Pat
Posts: 4327
Joined: Tue Oct 25, 2016 12:50 pm

MemphisFlash wrote:
Tue Oct 12, 2021 1:40 pm
the drive still whirs into action, just not recognised by the operating system.
have tried different USB ports, different cables. It doesn't sound like it has a "click"
so i am hopeful it is not permanent.
I had a similiar issue with my old pc not recognising a hard drive but it worked fine with my laptop.

Try it with a different pc or laptop then you'll know if the drive is the problem.
phil
Posts: 40
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2009 11:52 pm

If your hard drive has actually gone faulty it's whole different problem, but I formatted my drive c hdd and thought all was lost but I recovered every bit of it free. First I used 'Disk Drill' that worked fine found all the files but when I wanted to save to another disk they wanted some money not a lot perhaps 50 or £60 so I tried 'Recova' free version and I got all back free. It does take a while even my ssd 250gb took a good few hours so a 2tb mechanical disk could run into a day or more but you can watch the files appearing and you'll a another large disk to recover them to . Hope that helps
Trader Pat
Posts: 4327
Joined: Tue Oct 25, 2016 12:50 pm

phil wrote:
Tue Oct 12, 2021 2:39 pm
If your hard drive has actually gone faulty it's whole different problem, but I formatted my drive c hdd and thought all was lost but I recovered every bit of it free. First I used 'Disk Drill' that worked fine found all the files but when I wanted to save to another disk they wanted some money not a lot perhaps 50 or £60 so I tried 'Recova' free version and I got all back free. It does take a while even my ssd 250gb took a good few hours so a 2tb mechanical disk could run into a day or more but you can watch the files appearing and you'll a another large disk to recover them to . Hope that helps
I didn't think it was possible to recover data from an SSD due to TRIM?
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Derek27
Posts: 23477
Joined: Wed Aug 30, 2017 11:44 am
Location: UK

MemphisFlash wrote:
Tue Oct 12, 2021 9:23 am
Can anyone suggest any good software to recover an external drive that does not show up in windows 10.
I have lost all my colourful excel sheets and stats data from many years.
It is a 2TB seagate drive.
I fear i may have to format the drive (once i can see it) and all data will be lost forever.
Is there any way i can recover the drive, and the corresponding data?

Thanks

Tom
It's unthinkable for me not to have backups, preferably remote backups. If you've got another drive with enough capacity make a raw backup of the entire hard drive. It shouldn't matter if it's not formatted. A raw backup simply backs up every sector whether it's in use or not. Then you can use recovery software to search the hard drive for the old MFT and recover the files.
phil
Posts: 40
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2009 11:52 pm

No problem at all, my ssd had been formatted with a 'right click - format' by mistake , it hadn't been wiped with samungs software
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