Is there any private one out there? I have an HDD which doesn’t initialize. Read somewhere that perhaps data recovery is possible with an issue like this, and its still showing up in disk management so it not completely dead yet. Any suggestions?
Last time I had this issue, I went to a local computer repair shop. They have expertise and the equipment to do this right. I didn’t want to further brick my stuff myself doing the wrong thing by mistake.
Maybe try this:
Unfortunately not an option in my city. I could send it to another, but I haven’t decided on that yet. I also don’t want anyone else to see the data, so there’s that too
Thanks
Thanks, will look into it
Tools that I can personally recommend because I’ve successfully tried both
DMDE Professional tool, you can only see what it can recover for free. (paid)
Autopsy open source digital Forensics (free)
There are other recommended solutions, but they can be quite expensive. It’s important to note that before you start working on the HDD, you should clone the disk first and use that image for data analysis. This way, if anything goes wrong, the original disk remains untouched.
I had been using IsoBuster for years to recover data from optical media, but it also supports hard disks:
Last time my friend had this issue, I used Recuva free version and had great success with it:
I had to run it over night and some video files were corrupted, but I was able to restore almost everything and backed up to a new hard drive.
This was some time before the pandemic (maybe 10? years ago) so I’m not sure how good this software is now, especially when I don’t use Windows anymore. But if it were to happen again, I would try out this software first before looking for anything else.
Microsoft have a free tool available you can download from the Microsoft Store called Windows File Recovery - Windows File Recovery - Microsoft Support
Haven’t used it myself, so can’t comment on how effective it is.
Vouching for this one has it has saved me a couples of times a long time ago.
did you find some good ones?
Of all the recommendations, DMDE looked the best. Still couldn’t recover, but it was a longshot anyway. It was a single file though; apparently it has a limit after which you have pay. It was quite complex too, had ai walk me through it. Worth a try.
thanks a lot!
If your HDD is still showing up in Disk Management, that’s actually a good sign and means it might not be completely dead yet. Drives that don’t initialize can sometimes still be accessed with the right tools, especially if the issue is more logical than physical. I would avoid trying to format or reinitialize it for now, as that can overwrite data. There are quite a few tools out there, and you can check this best data recovery software which gives a decent overview of options. Some programs can scan the drive even if it’s not fully accessible and recover files from it. Just make sure you install any recovery tool on a different drive, not the one you’re trying to recover. Also, be patient because scans can take a long time depending on the size of the HDD. If it doesnt work, you maybe need to look into professional recovery services.
I have two drives, one does show up but it asks me to reformat it due initialisation error or smth, been a while. Other just doesn’t show up, and trying to boot into windows while it’s connected (as a second drive) freezes the PC.
For the later drive, someone suggested to put it in a freezer, but never got around to trying it + it being a laptop drive so idk. Been a few years now. I had partial backup of it on SD Cards, but it’s been like a decade since I last accessed them so I doubt much is left there.