Recover the hard drive

Hello, I have encountered an unpleasant event. My external hard drive has stopped working. The disc is no longer readable . When I connect the disc to my computer, the system asks me to format it.

There are very important files on the disc.


Does anyone know how to help me?

 

Yes, I tried Recuva. But it found a small number of files.

Yes, this procedure is very expensive for me. So, I decided to find a way to solve this problem myself.

 

It probably would have been better if it found none. The fact it found some suggests it was able to read the disk (a good thing) but only found a few recoverable files (not a good thing). Since most software based file recovery programs work in similar ways, I suspect it is unlikely a different program will fair any better. Wise Data Recovery is also popular and worth a try, but I would not get my hopes up.

Sadly, like many free programs, it only allows you to recover up to 2GB of data without paying for the premium/pro version. But it does tell you if there are more recoverable files.

So did you solve it?

It is important to understand that forums like CHF are here to learn, but also to share what we have learned so others may learn from our experiences. Did you find a way to solve it? If so, please share it.

I think this is a good opportunity to remind everyone how important it is to have a backup plan in place that entails having "multiple" backup copies of any data we don't want to lose, preferably, with at least one copy "off-site".

 

I did manage to solve this problem.

I came across this video tutorial.




True, it cost me $97.95, but that's nothing compared to taking the disc to a technician. I risked losing my files forever. But I can't afford to pay a lot of money.
Let me tell you a little bit about how I did it.
I downloaded Hetman Partition Recovery, the program displayed my RAW drive, which used to be FAT, and started a full scan. It found most of my files and successfully recovered them. Yes, it couldn't recover all the files, but I was lucky: I recovered the most important ones .

And yes, make copies of important files (discs) for the future.

Also, thanks to everyone who tried to help me)