Yesterday out of the blue my external 500G drive has become inaccessible. It still shows up as a drive, and there are no grinding noises or anything, but when I click on it, it says "Drive not yet formatted. Format now?"

I know it's possible to recover the data, but was wondering if anyone has any experience or recommendations. Some places charge $1,000 for recovering a 500G drive in a class 100 clean room, then there's the geeksquad who charges less, and there's even "free data recovery software" on thefreecountry.com

Thoughts? Suggestions? Experiences?

I've taken the drive offline for the time being. Some of the data was not backed up...

TIA!

PD

If the disk spins, you may want to try Spinrite. If this doesn't work, Spinrite is still good for saving other system.
www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

Have you tried it on another computer? How long has it been since a backup?

Has anyone tried the ol' put the hard drive in a freezer bag, put it in the freezer over night and then see if it works? Some people swear by it... that it allows you enough time to at least get the files off.

Tried it on other computers and different interfaces too (USB/firewire) but no can do.

Trying SpinRite now... seems to be the least expensive option for now.

A few months' work had not been backed up because the backup drive was full...

Live and learn...

Thanks for your inputs.

If you're a member of PPA, call them. Their insurance will help cover the expense of data recovery.


Eric

Try DiskWarrior. Seriously.

If you don't have a Mac, borrow someone's and run DiskWarrior from it. You boot from the CD so you don't have to install anything.

It's fixed so many problems like this for me. It's always the first thing I try, and it's usually the only thing needed.

+1 on spinrite.

I've also heard that the housing for drives can go bad and cause the drive to appear bad when in reality all you need to do is crack open the housing and plug the drive directly into your computer through IDE or SATA (whatever connector the drive uses).

I really hope that spinrite works for you..please post back your result.

If not, I used on-track data recovery when I lost a drive. They just got the plug of their life with this story:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/05/09/c...a.ap/index.html

Ok. Thanks all. We'll find out first thing in the morning whether spinrite did its magic... or i'll have to crack open the case of the WD MyBook and attach to the ATA/IDE interface. These days there's even a YouTube video showing you how to crack open the case...

in any case I'll have get religious about backing up.

Round one result... no good. SpinRite tech support said they do not claim full support of external USB drive, and recommend that I open the case and attach the drive directly to the motherboard's controller then run SpinRite again...

Round two, ding ding...

Heard from SpinRite's tech support that if Level 2 Data Recovery didn't do the trick, my problem may be beyond what SpinRite can do. They recommended me to send the drive to places that do "real data recovery"
My problem may be related to file system corruption...

Time to join PPA...