Storage Solutions External HDD unable to show on my computer

Dr. House

Disciple
Hello! I own one year old 2TB Seagate Backup Plus HDD. Suddenly I plugged in and it is not showing in my computer. I checked the device manager it is showing plugged in. I checked the device manager it is showing there, I opened disk management and got shocked as it is asking for initialize and capacity is 49000 TB. I checked again in different windows notebook it is showing the same. Even in linux it is not detecting.
I have 1.2 TB of precious data in that.. I don't know how the hell this happened?, I take care of it like a baby, keep it in hard disk case safely, never dropped.
I tried to check on crystaldisk info but it is not showing there. I tried recovery software provided by seagate cc but it is not able to analyze the data after an hour.
I googled and found it may be because of corruption in the primary sector. I am not sure though.
What should I do? My valuable personal data is in that? Please HELP!
 
The same happened to my completely full 3TB WD drive. The boot sector got corrupted. NTFS doesn't even have duplicate copies of boot sector so restoration is a problem. It's just anime so i didn't bother restoring data on the drive.

Q: If your data is so precious, why don't you have 2 backups of it?

Anyway, buy another 2TB hdd and use testdisk to recover data from the drive. Don't try to restore the boot sector MBR with testdisk even if you can see all files. It can mess up and you will end up with more problems. Just buy a new hdd and let testdisk copy everything off the old hdd to the new one.

Even in linux it is not detecting.
Have you checked in disks program? What are you using? Ubuntu etc?
 
I always have fear of this happening. To try and mitigate this, I have 2 HDDs at home. One is WD 4TB and another is Seagate 2TB. I deliberately bought 2 different brands. If I have to copy anything to HDD, I copy in both HDD at one go to make sure 2 copies are there.

I am also waiting for Apple to reduce price on their iCloud storage as with many Apple devices in home, it only makes sense to use iCloud for automatic backup of iPhones and I can use the iCloud Drive to store all the content.
 
Since years I"m still figuring out weather or not to opt for external drives and every now and the i stumble upon such incidents and I feel by method of dual backups on inter hard drives works perfectly fine.
The premium we pay for external drives seems not at all worthy for precious data.
Dont know what it is, but people using their external drives with utmost care one day are left suffering when the drive doesn't gets detected or data gets corrupted, lost partitions or zero sized data.
I will carry on with the most trusted ancient method of internal drives maintaining dual or quad copies.
 
The same happened to my completely full 3TB WD drive. The boot sector got corrupted. NTFS doesn't even have duplicate copies of boot sector so restoration is a problem. It's just anime so i didn't bother restoring data on the drive.

Q: If your data is so precious, why don't you have 2 backups of it?

Anyway, buy another 2TB hdd and use testdisk to recover data from the drive. Don't try to restore the boot sector MBR with testdisk even if you can see all files. It can mess up and you will end up with more problems. Just buy a new hdd and let testdisk copy everything off the old hdd to the new one.


Have you checked in disks program? What are you using? Ubuntu etc?
From now I should keep all those personal photos and files on Google drive as well. I also used linux mint via USB and it unable to detect the external drive.
Now I bought a new 2TB Seagate Backup Ultra and it comes with exFAT format.
Does it duplicate copy of boot sector unlike NTFS? Anyways exFAT looks better as it supports writing data in macbooks.
I installed testdisk. Looks like ancient DOS software.

Please teach me how to use this testdisk step by step. :disrelieved::disrelieved::disrelieved::disrelieved:

I selected the 44990 TB drive and then it asked the partition type. I selected the Intel/PC Partition > then analyse > then it shows read error. I clicked on quick search as it was the only option then it took infinity to scan. How much time I should can? Scanning 1.17 billion cylinders will take days to analyse as it thinks disk is of 44990TB.
 
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Advancements are being made just to fleece the customer, things may look easy but they are not helpful.

I still have around 50 dvd discs that i used may be in last 10 years to backup my media files nd windows images
They all are still fine atleast the ones that i checked

What's the point in making a backup of a backup and tnen one more
 
Advancements are being made just to fleece the customer, things may look easy but they are not helpful.

I still have around 50 dvd discs that i used may be in last 10 years to backup my media files nd windows images
They all are still fine atleast the ones that i checked

What's the point in making a backup of a backup and tnen one more
I am here to get help for data recovery. Not interested to know alternatives.
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You haven't learnt from mistakes!
Read the 6pack first reply. He said get an another drive for recovery. I am more interested in data recovery with testdisk software. Seagate is very reliable brand for storage I am relying on them from over 15 years. This is the first time I faced any issue.
 
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I am here to get help for data recovery. Not interested to know alternatives.
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Read the 6pack first reply. He said get an another drive for recovery. I am more interested in data recovery with testdisk software. Seagate is very reliable brand for storage I am relying on them from over 15 years. This is the first time I faced any issue.
That wasn't a story, it's a proven fact. But seems you are far too stressed
On topic testdisk and recuva are your best bet
 
YouTube is a good resource for step by step instructions.
Recuva will not keep original file names while recovering them. It will name images as img001 etc.

 
I analyse with testdisk on another computer after few minutes it shows no partition found or selected for recovery comes up.

Below it asked deeper scan I did and it shows the same message. Please help!

Disk Management -

Untitled1.jpg


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Untitled0.jpg
 
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Try using Photorec. It should be in the same folder as Testdisk.

Or try Recuva.

Ideally, you should make a virtual hdd copy and work on that copy, but it's showing up in Petabytes. How much disk size shows up in Linux Mint? Have you installed ntfs-3g and exfatutils in Mint?
 
Try using Photorec. It should be in the same folder as Testdisk.

Or try Recuva.

Ideally, you should make a virtual hdd copy and work on that copy, but it's showing up in Petabytes. How much disk size shows up in Linux Mint? Have you installed ntfs-3g and exfatutils in Mint?
Recuva is not even able to detect the external HDD. I am currently using windows 10 not linux. In Linux mint it was not able to detect mounting.

I think Photorec will take infinity to scan by examining this:

Untitled.jpg
 
Get data back is my preferred medium (since 15yrs now) along with Stellar as second fav and last but best EaseUS Partition Recovery.
Using GDB I have recovered what not... old lost partitions, goofed up partitions, mbr lost partitions, deleted data, I have even recovered data from partitions which I created and deleted few yrs ago, and almost 95% lost data.
Only thing I can guarantee is about external drives even though they too are internals except for the usb interface.

Tru EaseUS Partition Recovery to show up last good know partition.
 
I think it's dead completely by the looks of it. Just RMA it since external drives have 3 years warranty. Backup to 2 different external HDDs in future.
 
DOnt go by the nos. If you want to proceed with hopes you have to be very very patient in such matters.
Exactly 3yrs ago one fine day suddenly doing nothing I lost data from one hdd (the partition vanished) and I was so mad I was like quitting and throwing the system. Invested the entire night + day recovering 88% data,. Then dumping it into 2 disks, created isos and zips, sorting the data like early (directory structure) until breathing a sigh of relief...
Entire saga lasted a few days I took leaves from office.
Still clueless why it happened....
 
I think it's dead completely by the looks of it. Just RMA it since external drives have 3 years warranty. Backup to 2 different external HDDs in future.
May I know how it really happened? There is no physical damage. The data inside is mostly copied from a HDD that had bad sector damage. I recovered it in linux mint last year in this. And now this got primary sector broken. :(
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DOnt go by the nos. If you want to proceed with hopes you have to be very very patient in such matters.
Exactly 3yrs ago one fine day suddenly doing nothing I lost data from one hdd (the partition vanished) and I was so mad I was like quitting and throwing the system. Invested the entire night + day recovering 88% data,. Then dumping it into 2 disks, created isos and zips, sorting the data like early (directory structure) until breathing a sigh of relief...
Entire saga lasted a few days I took leaves from office.
Still clueless why it happened....
Alrighty then! I am going to proceed overnight to see any percent improvement. If it steller read few percent sector then I will get hope to proceed further; hope my laptop don't get overheat or broke in this. I am worried about it. It's pentium silver quad core 2019 model.
 
May I know how it really happened? There is no physical damage. The data inside is mostly copied from a HDD that had bad sector damage. I recovered it in linux mint last year in this. And now this got primary sector broken. :(

Nobody knows. All we can do is take a guess. Mechanical HDDs die for any reason. One of my new disks just stopped powering on completely out of the blue. A disk will fail no matter how good you take care of it.
 
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