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 1 week ago

If this is one of the physically smaller models, usually indicated by only having a USB connector (vs a separate power brick), you can probably ignore all of the advice to take it apart to use a SATA connector. These smaller ones don't have SATA, but rather a soldered USB connector.

The advice of using ddrescue, R Studio, etc is better, but still probably not going to help you if the drive doesn't show up at all. At this point, you're hoping that the drive lost its MBR/GPT (basically the table of contents) and nothing more. This really isn't too likely, although you may have some luck getting the data you care about.

Take the advice of professional recovery very seriously. You need to consider how important the data is to you, because this might be your only chance to recover it. Also, IME it's usually a couple thousand, but that really depends on the service.