Help HDD recovery

[noobsaibot999]

https://www.wavlink.com/en_us/product/WL-ST336A_Black.html

My wavlink HDD dock made 2 of my backup hdd corrupted or inaccessible for almost 4 times already since January. The Seagate 3 times, WD 1 time.

 

It's done it so many times that I've given up on the files on the Seagate drive, and used it as a test sample on what makes the hdd dock do this to my drives. So far nothing made sense and it just does it whenever it wants to, I think the dock is now faulty.

 

I tried fixing/recovering the drive with cmd but after fixing the drives, the files dont show when exploring

 

I tried using SeaTools to check if theres something with my drive. it passed everything 100%  but the advance testing made it undetectable in Seatools and disk management.

because of all this bullshit I accidentally tested another drive that contains all my important files.

 

This hitachi drive became not initialized, now it asks me to make it GPT or MBR. It's status in disk manager is Unallocated. i haven't formatted it yet.

 

Im planning to buy a data recovery software. Any recommendations on what to do?
1. Seagate = not detected
2. Hitachi & WD = unallocated

all of this drives are 100% healthy

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, noobsaibot999 said:

I tried fixing/recovering the drive with cmd but after fixing the drives, the files dont show when exploring

 

What commands did you use?

 

4 minutes ago, noobsaibot999 said:

This hitachi drive became not initialized, now it asks me to make it GPT or MBR. It's status in disk manager is Unallocated. i haven't formatted it yet.

 

Does it work in the drive enclosure? Some of those will make it so they won't work just plugged into a pc, but its pretty rare.

 

6 minutes ago, noobsaibot999 said:

This hitachi drive became not initialized, now it asks me to make it GPT or MBR. It's status in disk manager is Unallocated. i haven't formatted it yet.

 

Does it show data when using file recovery tools? Id make a image of the corrupted hdds, and stop using that dock.

[Archer42]

1 hour ago, noobsaibot999 said:

because of all this bullshit I accidentally tested another drive that contains all my important files.

 

This hitachi drive became not initialized, now it asks me to make it GPT or MBR. It's status in disk manager is Unallocated. i haven't formatted it yet.

 

Im planning to buy a data recovery software. Any recommendations on what to do?

It really depends on what you did.

If you ran write test (which seems likely by the sound of it) your data is irreversibly lost at this point. No way to restore it at all.

 

As for data recovery software - there is always testdisk, which is free and honestly works better than many payed software.

 

What I'd do is make full image of the hdd and then run testdisk to see what it sees. If all the hdd was not overwritten it might just restore partitions for you, if it was... no reason to spend money on any software - the data is gone.

[noobsaibot999]

7 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What commands did you use?

chkdsk /f and /r

7 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Does it work in the drive enclosure? Some of those will make it so they won't work just plugged into a pc, but its pretty rare.

The Seagate is on my dock and it works but its not detected in Seatools

The Hitachi is a drive in my laptop.

7 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Does it show data when using file recovery tools? Id make a image of the corrupted hdds, and stop using that dock.

 

I havent tested yet because my recovery apps or on the hitachi drive

 

 

[noobsaibot999]

6 hours ago, Archer42 said:

It really depends on what you did.

If you ran write test (which seems likely by the sound of it) your data is irreversibly lost at this point. No way to restore it at all.

 

As for data recovery software - there is always testdisk, which is free and honestly works better than many payed software.

 

What I'd do is make full image of the hdd and then run testdisk to see what it sees. If all the hdd was not overwritten it might just restore partitions for you, if it was... no reason to spend money on any software - the data is gone.

I'll see what I can do with testdisk. What can I do with the seagate drive?

[noobsaibot999]

The seagate drive is accessible now, I just need to see if I can recover some of my files there. Im still making an image for the Hitachi drive

[noobsaibot999]

On 2/17/2021 at 4:03 AM, Archer42 said:

It really depends on what you did.

If you ran write test (which seems likely by the sound of it) your data is irreversibly lost at this point. No way to restore it at all.

 

As for data recovery software - there is always testdisk, which is free and honestly works better than many payed software.

 

What I'd do is make full image of the hdd and then run testdisk to see what it sees. If all the hdd was not overwritten it might just restore partitions for you, if it was... no reason to spend money on any software - the data is gone.

I was able to recover some files with disk digger but the names  are by sector so it's harder to sort.

Can testdisk recover them with there original names or location on the drive?

[Archer42]

39 minutes ago, noobsaibot999 said:

I was able to recover some files with disk digger but the names  are by sector so it's harder to sort.

Can testdisk recover them with there original names or location on the drive?

Well, that's a good sign - means the stuff was no completely overwritten.

Sadly when you use testdisk to recover files filenames are lost, but did you try recovering partitions entirely? If the damage was not too severe it is often possible and will result in restored partitions along with file/folder structure. Now that you have created an image you can safely experiment with the hdd, allowing testdisk to try fixing stuff. In case it goes wrong you can always restore the image.