help recover data from defective harddisk (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Some of the newer ones have moved away from that in the past decade. That’s how I “made” some SATA adapters years ago and got cheaper hard drives to put internally in my laptops.

I did one in about 2015 and when I opened it up, the SATA adapter wasn’t there and instead they had put a micro USB directly onto the board of the hard drive, so you couldn’t detach it.

this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025

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