In Windows explorer, it just shows up as a RAW drive with no other info. The drive shows up in Disk Management with capacity and filesystem as RAW, but nothing can be done with it (I haven’t tried doing any partitioning or full formatting as I don’t want to erase the data). I even tried to do a quick format (only quick so to maintain the files but replace the file system, which in theory would allow recuva to scan and collect data) but that failed. Now this is the only error the drive displays, and no amount of fiddling or trying different ports or methods over the last few hours has got me to a stage where I can scan the drive again. Somehow, one of the unplug/plugging in of the drive at some previous stage did something to make the drive like this. Taking the drive back out of the enclosure and plugging directly gave the same error. In this state, recuva would say it can’t tell what filesystem the drive has and so couldn’t scan, and so this is where I swore loudly at the wall. Now the drive didn’t display the ‘this drive needs to be formatted before use’ error, and instead showed an incorrect parameter error before showing a ‘a device which does not exist was specified’ error. So I thought let’s just put it back in the enclosure and recover via the USB connection after all, so I put everything back together and this is where the real trouble starts. So I opened Recuva but recuva wouldn’t scan the drive in this new state.

Issue was clicking on each folder would throw an error. Fantastic, I thought, I can just recover the files like this. When plugged in via SATA, the drive showed up with more info than before, including capacity and the folders in the root of the drive. (Believe me, I regret this).Įxtracting the drive revealed it to be a Seagate Barracuda. My thought process at the time was the recovery would take a long time bottlenecked by the USB 2.0 connection on the enclosure, so a direct connection would speed it up. Instead of just recovering the files there and then, I thought I’d extract the 3.5″ drive from the enclosure and plug it in directly to the motherboard via SATA. Obviously reformatting would wipe it, so I plugged it into my pc and ran Recuva.Īfter a 9 hour scan it showed basically all his files, but this is where I was incredibly stupid. It also didn’t show any status of capacity or usage (showed up like a RAW drive). My father’s IOMEGA external 500 GB HDD threw an error message yesterday saying it needed to be reformatted to be read. Instead the hard drive needs a data recovery company to retrieve the data using a hardware based solution which is the only that will work.

In this example the data drive is damaged and because of this, no software is going to be able to repair it. Here’s an excellent example of why you should use a data recovery company instead of data recovery software.

How long does recuva take