one of my data disk (with a healthy collection of family photos) suddenly did not show up on windows 10 upon boot up. Under disk management, the disk is listed as uninitialized.under disk management.
inside diskpart, it is shown as a drive but with no information.
how do I recover the disk? Its a 5TB Seagate 2.5 disk. the usual disk recovery software (eg testdisk) cannot see the drive - because its uninitialized.
Is it a partition issue or is the drive completely dead? help needed please.
First of all - don’t pay a single red cent for software recovery unless the open source/free tool options are proven ineffective - my guess is that 50-75% of the data recovery software out there are just recompiled versions of open source stuff that’s available out there.
Second - does the drive seem like it’s physically damaged? Do you hear clicks (head reset) constantly or does it sound rather normal? And is it
one of those hybrid SSD drives? If it’s a bog standard HDD and it sounds healthy, that's fine. The half-breed SSHDs have an extra mode of failure that makes dealing with them challenging to say the least.
Third - if you used Christophe Grenier's testdisk (photorec is pretty much the same thing), what you want to do is try to recover a FILESYSTEM, not merely files. Run it on a deep scan via GPT or whatever, and then see if it can find something that is exfat, fat32, NTFS, some flavor of ext, whatever. Pay no attention to what Win10 would say since it does not understand most filesystems anyways. The question is really whether testdisk a) sees a USB drive b) can read to a USB drive and c) can see something, anything off a USB drive.
In fact, if I am attempting a filesystem recovery, I'll boot into something like Debian Linux since it's less likely to give you the "Windows can't see it so it's broken" BS. DD'ing your suspect drive into another drive is good practice, but it could take several hours to several days. If it's not the hardware you might be better off using the deeper scan mode in Testdisk to see if you can find something off the original, and then if you can, just point the recovery directory to another drive so the stuff you found is not written back to the suspect drive.
