Feiertag wrote:
The only thing that pops up is, "Do you want to format?" Obviously I decline the option.
I realize there have been many responses to this and I haven't had the time to read through them all. Please forgive any duplication of information here. I have recovered drives in various states of disrepair many times over the years. The worst and last resort was to send a drive to a lab where they could dismanted the drive, remove the platters, and spin them up on their systems. Mind you, this was a last resort and the drive and laptop had been dropped while the laptop was running and my wife at the time had photos she wanted to recover. This was a head crash issue and probably not your case based upon your description.
Before attempting to format and recover, which I would say is the next to the last resort, I recommend the following:
1. Get a Linux live distro disk such as Knoppix. You will probably need to create one by downloading the ISO file and then burning a disk.
2. Shut your system down and connect your external drive
3. Boot your system using the live distro disk. This will NOT damage your system or its files unless you actually do something with the files. Case in point, I have been able to over ride Windows security parameters using Knoppix by twiddling with the files.
4. Your external drive should appear as an available drive on the Linux interface. From here you should be able to copy the files over to some folder you have on your system. I recommend creating a new folder just to be certain your other files are not mistakenly overwritten.
5. After you have copied the files, you can boot up on your usual operating system, verify the files, and then format the external drive if you so desire.
My brother had a similar case but his system would not boot at all. All the Windows repair actions failed. I took his system drive, put it into an external enclosure, connected it to my system, used Knoppix to recover his data and programs, and rebuiilt his system on a new drive. When all was done, his system looked as though nothing had happened.
In your case, if the controller in the enclosure is bad---not likely but possiible---you would need to obtain a different enclosure to get this to work. The other issue would be to if the partition table is too corrupted but in such cases it may be possible to "bit walk" through the drive and recover the data by rebuiding the partition table---takes a lot of time is the downside.
If you have not found any satisfactory solutions from other resources such as Best Buy, Frys, etc. Send my a private message and I will be glad to help in any way possible.
C. R. Smith (Charles)
Angel Star Photography
www.angelstarphotography.com