Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

That happened to me three times with one external that I was using for something else.
I found that "allow delayed write" was set for the drive.
I had to re-format to get it to work each time. What I lost was not important as it was just a copy of information.
It MIGHT be possible to quick format and have a recovery program look for the files that you "cant see".
Check with a computer professional.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

My suggestion is to buy a new drive and then copy the photos from your backup drive to the new one.

TBerwick Loc: Houston, Texas

My approach to recovery would be to remove the drive from it's case and temporarily mount it as a 2nd drive in your or a different computer. Boot the system & see if the drive is recognized. If so, you can move your files to a new drive. Failing electronics in the supporting case for external hard drives is a common problem. If you have a friend who is computer savvy, then it may be possible to boot with some flavor of Unix on a USB stick and perhaps access the drive that way. The first step however is to identify if the electronics of the external case are kaput. This is a case of having a buddy who is also a computer geek available or on speed dial. Also, I'm assuming you're running Windows. I'm not familiar with Apple hardware.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Various recovery programs are available to rebuild corrupt directories on drives, restoring most files to their former accessibility.

HOWEVER, their success depends on the drive being mechanically and electronically sound. If you have an electronic failure, that might be in the power supply. A new power supply (if it's external) might fix the issue. When a drive just "whirs and clicks" and never mounts, chances are good that you have a mechanical failure that has rendered it inoperable and unrecoverable by software means. When a read/write head has crashed into a rotating platter, you need Drive Savers or some other data recovery company to disassemble the drive and recover what they can from it. Expect that to cost many times as much as the drive itself!

Unfortunately, many folks realize all too late that they should have had a backup strategy in place. Backup means keeping MORE than one copy of your important work, preferably with one copy on-site and another off-site (perhaps cloud-based).

Feiertag Loc: British Columbia, Canada

Thank you.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

Unfortunately I see this time and time again on this forum. Digital data is volatile. But it is easily copied. It is also easy to store a copy off-site as a hedge against fires, theft etc. Unfortunately the copy has to be made before disaster strikes.

I hope that this unfortunate example will motivate others with valuable pictures to back them up.

Joe Blow

The standard questions to this include:

What Operating system are you using and is it up to date?

Have you updated any of the drive's drivers?

Have you tried a different USB cable and or port?

Have you tried a different computer?

If the answer to those is positive, have you tried a recovery program? I recommend CC Recuva, https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

Feiertag Loc: British Columbia, Canada

I will look it up. Thank you.

Rogers

Is it a solid state drive? If so make sure you fully charge the battery. Use Norton or windows to “repair” the “disk”. I have a WD SSD and you have to keep it charged. It’s no good for long term storage.

Rogers

(Accidental duplicate post)

johneccles Loc: Leyland UK

I have the same hard drive with the same problem, WD doesn't want to know so it's scrap, fortunately, the same files were copied to a Seagate and an HGST HDD portable drive.

cameraf4 Loc: Delaware

Haven't had this problem ...yet. "It isn't a case of "If" a hard drive will fail, it's "When."" While I hope not to be in your shoes, I always copy my "Keepers" to 2 different external drives. Along with the files on my PC, this gives me 3 chances to save my best shots.

dave.m

[quote=burkphoto]Various recovery programs are available to rebuild corrupt directories on drives, restoring most files to their former accessibility......}

Here's a well established company with loads of excellent HDD and SDD management sofrware whi have a free and paid version recovery tool which I have used more than once (fotuantely only once on one of mine but more than once on friends and relatives :)

https://www.minitool.com/data-recovery-software/free-for-windows.html


Its non destructive in that you need another drive to copy to. If it can't recover or decipher the directory structure it searches from end to end for files of your choice (ie JPEG, TIFF etc.) then allows you to copy to the other drive. A big drive low level search may take a few hours, and it may not be able to recover the orginal file names if they are the damaged part but at least you'll get the files back.


IMPORTANT - do nothing with your existing drive. Almost certainly part of the directory structure is corupted, so software like the above that is non-distructive is ALWAYS your first try.

Good luck!

Dunno about your backup strategy but guess it doesn't / or don't want to use the Cloud. I worked for a number of years in data management and most don't follow a 3 set local backup. And 3x 1TB drives are not such a big price issue these days. Once out of this painful experience PM me and I'll describe a relatively simple Windows based 3 set incremental backup with free software that will always leave at least 2 fallbacks if you have a disaster during use of 1 backup.

Robertl594 Loc: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Nantucket

I had same problem with a 4 TB drive. Here is your simple answer that will most likely get your files back. http://Datarecovery.com
Best of luck.
RL

dave.m

And no consolation at all, but if a directory corruption, it was probably caused by disconnecting the drive without Windows 'eject' after a long write. It's not well known that with a 'big' write task the PC 'caches' the files in memory while the relatively slow hard drive writes the files. Worse, it also caches the changing directory structure, so without an 'eject' which flushes the cache to disk it can be left in an indeterminate state - hence Windows asking to format