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

Out of interest, do recovery services look at the data they've recovered? I'd rather not have them potentially seeing all the pirated content alongside the personal data I need to recover.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I can't tell you for sure, I don't actually work in data recovery I just learned a lot about it because of...dumb decisions lmfao

But from what I've gleaned, they generally don't seek it out, but their tools will show them previews n such so that they can keep on eye on if things are coming through corrupted or not

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Nobody cares about your horse porn. They have seen worse.

this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025

8 points (83.3% liked)

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