Expert assistance/solutions to repair an external seagate HDD - Access data

[Jennifer_87]

Hi,
Attempting to repair my Seagate 1TB hard drive. I have downloaded Minitools software and it has recognised my HDD as bad disk. I do not know how to use the partition recovery wizard and fear losing data if I proceed. I wish to save my data on this drive. There is a back story to this hdd being corrupted, I am not a computer novice, but can understand some technical terms. Could anyone please assist to repair my drive.
- Have contacted Seagate and recommended recovery software, unable to access drive on this.
- Hard drive was working, I had cc cleaner scanning for duplicate files, windows stopped responding, so I restarted it once it responded but it was taking too long so I forced restart. When I looked in 'This PC' it was not recognised, I checked device manager and it said the device is working properly. I checked Disk management and Disk 1 is unrecognised and not initialised.
- Called repair services around area, some have identified that it is a logical failure and possible partition problem
- Seagate dashboard drive test failed
- I have not tried cmd chkdsk in case I lose all my data.
- Data recovery services have estimated hundreds of dollars to recover my data
If anyone could help, please advise - My life is on this hard drive
Kind Regards, Jennifer

 

[bignastyid]

Reminds me of the old adage of not keeping all ones eggs in one basket. HDDs(even SSDs) will fail and some point, all important data should be kept on atleast 2 sources(my extremely important stuff is usually on atleast 3 sources and one is an external I keep in a fireproof safe.

Anything you try to do to the drive can make recovering the data more difficult to impossible even for a data recovery center. If the data is of extreme importance then you should use a data recovery facility.

If you still want to try and recover it your self the first step would be to remove the drive from the enclosure and either connect it internally to a desktop system as it's possible that the only failure is the adapter inside the enclosure. If it still displays the same behavior then you will need a data recovery software like Recuva or Getdataback. If the data recovery software can't recover it then you are back to spending money on a data recovery service and praying it hasn't been damaged to the point that is unrecoverable.