External Hard drive failure, can you help?

[PFLJayden]

I had a Verbatim 1.5TB Space (I think) go out on me. It first asked me if I wanted to format it. I didn't because I thought it'd wipe everything off it permanently. I cancelled it. My computer finds it by USB. But it's not recognizing anything other than device name (In this case, drive "O"). Anyone have any suggestions for me to do to hopefully save what's on the drive?

[Lee]

I think Bec (?) posted something a while back that might be able to read that info.

Alternately, with the latest Windows update, one of my external USB screwed up recently too, you might wanna remove the last update and see if that fixes the issue, im doing that later today as i need to pull some content from the funky drive.

Regards,

Lee

[Bec]

First off - you were right to NOT format!! It's the first sign you've got troubles with the OS partition.

I had this happen not long ago, and what saved my butt (and data) was Disk Genius

It's 49.99 or thereabouts and worth every penny.

Good luck!

[Bec]

So did you get this problem fixed?

[PFLJayden]

No I haven't got it fixed yet I'm using a program now "Get Data Back" to hopefully restore it.
The positive side is everything is backed up. All that's on it is all of our produced master videos. If push comes to shove we can reimport from the dvds, problem would be the quality distortion which I don't want.
I'm trying everything you suggested

I do truly appreciate your help!

[raymor]

Hopefully I'm not too late with my suggestion. USB drives are just SATA or IDE
drives in an adapter case, so sometimes you can pop the actual drive out, plug it
in to a SATA port, and be fine. Then get a new USB adapter, if you wish.

The FIRST thing to do, though, is always to make an image of the drive as soon as possible.
Definitely make an image before doing any recovery that will make any changes to the drive.
Several types of recovery attempts can do further damage, so you always want to keep
a pristine copy that had nothing done to it.