My friend has a 1 TB Western Digital Green hard disk, bought in 2011.
The hard disk is not accessible anymore. It gets detected in the BIOS, but does not show up in My Computer. It also does not show up in the Disk Management too.
The system specs are P5GC-MX Asus motherboard, with P-IV processor, running Windows XP SP3.
Until a few days ago, the hard disk was working fine.
My friend says that while accessing one of the partitions, he got an error message. He does not remember the message exactly (he is not very good with computers). He is not able to remember the exact message, which is a problem, because without it, it's hard to determine the cause. But, he says it had format in it.. and he says that the heading was Don't Format, or something like that, and he had clicked Yes. But, after a few seconds, he had then killed that process with Task Manager.
Maybe he accidentally formatted the disk, or partition table? That was my guess.. but it can be another reason too, for reasons below.
I bought the hard disk to my home, to try and access it on my computer, which has Intel i-3 processor, and running Windows 8.
On my PC, the hard disk does not show in My Computer, but it does show in Disk Management. On accessing Disk Management, it popped up a message that the drive is not initialized. It gives the option to initialize with MBR, or GPT. Since it was being used on XP SP3 on an older computer, I chose MBR.. but it failed to initialize because of I/O error.
Also, the hard disk is making a constant grinding sound, which suggests that the hard disk might have failed. That would account for the I/O error too.
The hard disk is still in warranty, and can be replaced, but the problem is that huge amount of important data is there on the hard disk, and that needs to salvaged. My friend is a photographer and a video maker, and there are videos and photos of weddings on this hard disk with no backup. Therefore, it's important that the data be retrieved.
Has the hard disk gone bad? Or, is there any chance that the data can be shown, and retrieved? It had 3-4 partitions on it, I think.
I had run Easeus Partition Master, and it too shows the disk, but with no data. It has the option of recovering a partition, but on running that, it does not show any partition to be recovered.
Has the partition table, or MBR been damaged, because of which it does not show the partitions or the data? Can it be restored somehow?
I won't be doing further research on it on my own, since my thinking is that any activity on it will only reduce the chances of data recovery. I am thinking of taking it to a professional service for data recovery, in case there is no better solution.
Any kind of help and ideas will be much appreciated.
The hard disk is not accessible anymore. It gets detected in the BIOS, but does not show up in My Computer. It also does not show up in the Disk Management too.
The system specs are P5GC-MX Asus motherboard, with P-IV processor, running Windows XP SP3.
Until a few days ago, the hard disk was working fine.
My friend says that while accessing one of the partitions, he got an error message. He does not remember the message exactly (he is not very good with computers). He is not able to remember the exact message, which is a problem, because without it, it's hard to determine the cause. But, he says it had format in it.. and he says that the heading was Don't Format, or something like that, and he had clicked Yes. But, after a few seconds, he had then killed that process with Task Manager.
Maybe he accidentally formatted the disk, or partition table? That was my guess.. but it can be another reason too, for reasons below.
I bought the hard disk to my home, to try and access it on my computer, which has Intel i-3 processor, and running Windows 8.
On my PC, the hard disk does not show in My Computer, but it does show in Disk Management. On accessing Disk Management, it popped up a message that the drive is not initialized. It gives the option to initialize with MBR, or GPT. Since it was being used on XP SP3 on an older computer, I chose MBR.. but it failed to initialize because of I/O error.
Also, the hard disk is making a constant grinding sound, which suggests that the hard disk might have failed. That would account for the I/O error too.
The hard disk is still in warranty, and can be replaced, but the problem is that huge amount of important data is there on the hard disk, and that needs to salvaged. My friend is a photographer and a video maker, and there are videos and photos of weddings on this hard disk with no backup. Therefore, it's important that the data be retrieved.
Has the hard disk gone bad? Or, is there any chance that the data can be shown, and retrieved? It had 3-4 partitions on it, I think.
I had run Easeus Partition Master, and it too shows the disk, but with no data. It has the option of recovering a partition, but on running that, it does not show any partition to be recovered.
Has the partition table, or MBR been damaged, because of which it does not show the partitions or the data? Can it be restored somehow?
I won't be doing further research on it on my own, since my thinking is that any activity on it will only reduce the chances of data recovery. I am thinking of taking it to a professional service for data recovery, in case there is no better solution.
Any kind of help and ideas will be much appreciated.