Best recovery program for borked USB HDD

MoRT489 · 5 Nov 2013 at 12:29

Hi guys,

I looked for a solution to my bro's problem regarding a USB drive that stopped working with the error "You need to format the disk in drive F: before you can use it" but no one here seems to have a solution to it

So the next step is recovery! Can anyone suggest decent paid/free recovery programs (PC or Mac, whichever works best)? He needs to retrieve photos that were on the drive (mostly RAW format in case it matters).

Thanks in advance :cool:

dt97583 · 5 Nov 2013 at 12:43

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

darael · 5 Nov 2013 at 12:58

I had an incident where my photos were deleted from the SD card of my camera. Recuva wasn't able to recover a single one, where GetDataBack got them all back.

Idleman · 5 Nov 2013 at 13:15

I use this http://www.easeus.com/landing/data-recovery-wizard.htm?gclid=CMjxgq7czboCFc7JtAodBkQAqA

s452 · 5 Nov 2013 at 13:21

what type of drive is it?
some (the older) external hard drives were just IDE or Sata drives that were connected to a SATA/IDE to USB interface, if possible, you could just try connecting the drive directly to a SATA/IDE port and see if it makes a difference?

honosuseri · 5 Nov 2013 at 13:25

I'd pop it out of it's caddy. With a bit of luck it might well be a sata drive. I use Spinrite to "refurb" HDDs it's a handy tool which I've even used it on PVR HDDs , it repaired the drive and the recordings were still intact.

MoRT489 · 5 Nov 2013 at 15:58

It's a Western Digital Passport drive so would it be worth opening it up to see if it is SATA inside or does someone know already that this is unnecessary?

Idleman · 5 Nov 2013 at 16:04

Just Google the Model number, that should tell you.