How To Recover An Unreadable Hard-Drive For Free (12/19/16)
Author: weshoot
A few days ago, I was looking for some files that weren’t on my Win 7 Pro PC, but rather on a “retired” external USB hard-drive. It was an old drive that had been taken out of service due to its age and the fact that it was almost full. I attached the drive to electrical power and my computer, and the drive registered, but was unreadable. A box popped up and asked if I wanted to format the drive. I said no. I knew that the files were still on that drive, but the computer couldn’t access them. I tried a few things, but to no avail. The company that manufactures the drive offers recovery software for $99.00 (not guaranteed), or will recover a drive if sent to them, starting at $499.00, up to $20,000.00. There is no charge if they can’t recover anything.
Read all the text below before proceeding.
I didn’t think the files in question were worth anything near this expenditure, but other files on the drive may be. Then I thought, “Find out what to do on YouTube!” I found this 2-minute, 12-second video that saved me a lot of money at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix13LRGmzk8 .
The one thing the video author didn’t address is how to get the correct command prompt to attempt this repair. I will add this: To get the proper Command Prompt, either find the short-cut in your Start Button Menu (usually in “All Programs”> Accessories) , and right-click it. Then click “Run As Administrator.” The command prompt will then say “C:\Windows\System32.” If you can’t find the Command Prompt shortcut, simply type “cmd” (without the quote marks) in the query line at the bottom of the start menu, and cmd.exe will show up above in the list. Right-click cmd.exe and “Run As Administrator.” Then follow the YouTube video. I don’t know if it will work for you (and I guarantee nothing, but it worked for me), and there may be files lost due to what caused the unreadable disk in the first place.
But give it some time as it takes a while, and the bigger the drive, the longer it takes. On my drive, the program found 6 bad sectors and overwrote them and the drive was readable in a few minutes, once Windows had indexed the drive. I was able to find and use the files I was looking for. I do not know if I lost anything valuable as there are quite a lot of files on this drive.
(Only do this repair if you are willing to assume all the risk.)
Gary Silverstein
-We Shoot
Tags: computer, computers, data, hard drive, harddrive, storage
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