People love external hard drives for their absolute convenience. When you need to import or extract data, simply plug it into your computer and start the data transfer. For the rest of the time, put it in your drawer.
But such love will vanish when you can no longer get your precious data out from your external drive. It would be fine if you just accidentally deleted some data from it because you can recover those deleted data easily. The worst case is that the gadget is having a software or hardware fault that requires professional knowledge and skills.
You will have to go through an external hard drive data recovery process. It can be done at home when the issue is something easy and common. But once the error is beyond our ability, we will have to apply to local recovery services and professional technicians.
Today, let’s see how to analyze the error of our external hard drive at home and how to recover data from it after that.
Analysis: Diagnosing the Error of External Hard Drive
For starters, you need to identify the error that you’re now facing. Then you can decide whether you should recover your data at home or turn it to the professionals.
Error 1: Data Loss Due to Deletion or Formatting
First of all, if you simply delete the data on your external hard drive or format the drive without backup, you can easily do the recovery at home. All you need is a data recovery program. Check the solution below.
Error 2: Hardware Fault of the External Drive
Do you hear some strange clicking or beeping noise when you plug the hard drive into your computer? If that is the case, stop using it right away, plug it out. Send it to a repair center right away. Some parts inside are broken. To stop further damage, you should quit every attempt to connect.
Note that if the hard drive has been through severe physical damage like burning, crashing, soaking in water, bending, or dropping from a height, etc, you’d better send it to a local repair center as well.
Error 3: Unrecognized Hard Drive
After you connect the external hard drive to your computer, there’s no pop-up saying a new USB device is connected. And you can’t find the icon or access of the external hard drive on the taskbar, File Explorer or even Disk Management. This is something we called an Unrecognized external hard drive.
If this is your case, you need to adjust some settings and update some drivers on your computer.
Error 4: Broken Sector(s) or Corrupted Files
No hardware error, no computer limitations. After a successful connection, your attempt of getting into a specific folder/partition of the external HDD or exporting a file fails. This may result from a bugged operating system of the device.
When this happens to you, try to fix the bad sector or files with some external HDD recovery programs. Then, you can have access to all the data inside.
Method 1: Recover External Hard Drive with Data Recovery Service
For hardware fault and physical damage to the external hard drive, quit home fixing. Find a nearby and trustworthy local data recovery service and send the device for repair.
You can search Data Recovery Service on Yelp or Manta. They will show you the most popular local business to you.
Can you fix those errors by yourself under the guidance of some YouTube videos?
To be honest, that’s not recommended if you don’t have any experience in fixing some digital devices. The internal structure can be complex and the parts can be fragile. A tiny mistake can ruin your hard drive completely. So, think twice before you decide to fix it yourself.
Or, you can choose to mail your broken external hard drive to some famous data recovery services like File Savers Data Recovery. It’s a nation-famous recovery service that has stores in almost every state. You may check out their official page for more details.
Method 2: Recover Data from External Hard Drive with Data Recovery Software
For data deletion, bad sectors, and corrupted data, we can try the data recovery at home first. Don’t worry, the operation suggested here won’t cause any further damage to the data and the device itself.
What you need for the data recovery on your external hard drive is an applicable data recovery program. You have countless choices online. When you type in “ Best data recovery for external hard drives”, Google may list several like Disk Drill, Stellar, EaseUS, and echoshare Data Recovery to you.
To be honest, all of them are powerful enough to turn your expectation into reality and get your data back in minutes. Today, I will take the handiest one – echoshare Data Recovery to you. You may choose this or any above data recovery program.
Start An External Hard Drive Data Recovery with echoshare Data Recovery
As mentioned, echoshare Data Recover is the handiest recovery program for external hard drives. Indeed, with the extremely intuitive screen and buttons, there are zero difficulties in using the program for any data recovery. By clicking a few buttons, you will have access to the lost data again.
Does such simplicity come with incapability? Not at all, this program supports plenty of file formats:
- Image: JPG, TIFF/TIF, PNG, BMP, GIF, PSD, CRW, CR2, NEF, ORF, RAF, SR2, MRW, DCR, WMF, DNG, ERF, RAW, etc.
- Email: PST, DBX, EMLX, etc.
- Audio: AIF/AIFF, M4A, MP3, WAV, WMA, MID/MIDI, OGG, AAC, etc.
- Video: AVI, MOV, MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3G2, WMV, ASF, FLV, SWF, MPG, RM/RMVB, etc.
- Documents: DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX, PDF, CWK, HTML/HTM, INDD, EPS, etc.
- Others: ZIP, RAR, SIT, EXE, and other useful data.
To wrap up, with this program, all data on your broken external drive will be back in minutes with a few clickings. Download it and let’s start the recovery now.
Steps to Recover Data from External Hard Drive
Step 1
Connect your external hard drive to a computer that’s installed with echoshare Data Recovery.
Step 2
Launch the program now. On its interface, choose an option under How does the file(s) lost.
- Choose Deleted when you accidentally delete the data.
- Tick Lost Partition if there’s a bad sector;
- Check Formatted for a formatted external hard drive.
Then, tick the file type of the target data. Click Next to proceed.
Step 3
On the new interface, locate the Removable Devices tab, and tick your external hard drive. Click Scan to initiate a data scan.
Step 4
When the scan is complete, browse all the deleted files that echoshare Data Recovery has found. Locate those that you need and click Recover.
Decide on a folder on your computer to keep these recovered data. Click OK to start the recovery.
