Recovering external hard drive

[Gedalia_w]

Hopefully someone can help after my fruitless google search.

I have a 2TB Samsung SATA hard drive in an external enclosure that has obviously developed some bad sectors after being dropped at one point in time in the past.

The issue is that I was trying to access a file on the hard drive and it hanged, so I obviously assumed it had some bad sectors corrupting that file.

The problem was that I ran windows disk check on the drive, and it just appeared to hang after a certain point. Thinking that the software had crashed on the bad sector, I cancelled the scan.

Since then, windows has not be able to read the drive. It can see that the Samsung drive is connected, and it thinks it's all ok, but in explore instead of showing up as E drive, it's G with no name and inaccessible.

The thing is, my data is still clearly on there and mostly ok, because when I connect my HDD to a TV, it sees the files and I can play them (I haven't tried every single file, or the one that caused the whole crash).

My other concern is that when I have the HDD connected to windows, I can hear just constantly clicking, a sure fire evidence of the HDD's imminent complete failure, so I want to replace it, but get all the data off first.

Any thoughts on how to get windows to see the hdd properly again so I can save my data?

 

[edscdk]

testdisk from www.cgsecurity.org

 

[hlxbravo]

I posted the following in another thread where a guy had a similar issue :

I am using, as I type, Active@ File Recovery For Windows. As I have an external HDD with pretty much the same as yourself on it, photo's, video's and all my music, which stays permanently powered on (never has before) and it's making a significant clicking/noisy whirr sound. Windows cannot see it apart from wanting to format it

I tried Macrium Reflect with no luck and also another one I saw mentioned on here(forget the name), again with no luck.

Anyway I managed to get the photo's off it the other day ...just waiting for it to complete my music library.

And to summarize it, all went perfectly and I managed to recover everything

 

[Gedalia_w]

Thanks for the tips guys.

I tried testdisk. It took an age for the hdd screen to come up, it hanged on the initial "please wait" for a long time. It eventually saw my hdd, with the correct name etc and I went through the process to write it back, rebooted, but no luck, still the same issue with windows seeing it, but seeing it as an unknown inaccessible hdd.

I tried installing the trial version Active File Recovery but it hung on installation! The trial version limits the size of the file you can recover, so it wouldn't of been of much use without paying for it. I might try installing it again.

Weird thing is that after all this, I connected the hdd back to the TV and it was still able to read all my files again. It's very frustrating. I lost nearly three hours last night trying to solve this to no avail!