Knackered HDD - file recovery

[JimM169]

Pretty sure I know the answer to this one but I'm going to ask anyway......

My external HDD died at the weekend with all my data on it! When I plug it in, windows recognises it as a 'local drive' but assigns it the drive letter D: when it has always been L: When you click on the drive letter to explore it, the drive spins up but nothing happens and after 20 mins or so windows reports an i/o error
I've tried Recoverit which identifies the drive as a lost partition but when I scan it, it just reports that there are many bad sectors, stops the scan and doesn't find any files to recover
It's not worth the expense of sending to an external firm but is there anything else I can do to try and recover the files myself? (Have tried swapping cables)

And before anyone says it I know I should have a backup of my files - ironically that's what I bought this HDD to be but it became my primary storage when I switched PCs (HDD from previous PC long gone)

Thanks

[Captain_Morgan]

It could be the controller at fault

Open the drive case and look at the hdd and buy a enclosure of the correct type for the drive from amazon for a few quid re mount the drive and see if you can access the data

Falling that I’m sure someone can recommend a data recovery firm but it’s likely more expensive than backing up in the first place

[dmsims]

On certain HD's the controller chip can get fried look for scorching on the PCB. These are replacable (not DIY though)

[colin79666]

Spinrite if you can take the hard drive out the caddy and connect it directly to ide/sata on an older pc. Isn’t free but not horribly expensive and usually gets drives going if there is any life left in them to revive.

[CharlesElliott]

All of the above suggestions are good ones, but it may be better to pay a professional....

[Davie_GLA]

Pretty useless advice now but to help prevent this when you get back up and running buy an office 365 sub. You get a TB of space and it syncs in real time with OneDrive.

If your house was to be damaged by fire or something else it’s the same scenario. An external drive in the same physical location isn’t really a solution.

I have OneDrive, iCloud and Google photos giving multiple layers of resilience.

Of course if you make a mess of the files then they get backed up then you have another problem however office 365 will allow recovery of previous versions, to a point.

I have the family plans for all of the above and probably costs something in the range of £25 a month but photos are irreplaceable, and very view print photos these days.

Good luck but I think you need to employ some professionals. Just make sure you are 100% comfortable about what’s on it

[JimM169]

Thanks all for the advice I'll crack the box open at the weekend to see if there's anything obvious on the physical drive

Fortunately I have found an old backup of most of the photos on google drive which I'd forgotten about so not as bad as it could have been but definitely learnt my lesson!!

[Funk]

The advice to remove and connect the bare drive directly is a good one. I use one of these for doing this: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00LN0GX4I



Be aware that some external hard drives can do funky stuff with partitions - on a couple of occasions I've put a drive in the caddy to find it's actually split into two (unallocated) partitions that the external drive's interface board then presented as a single logical partition. If it does this to you it might be difficult to recover.

Most times though (and provided there's no physical issue with the disk itsefl) the drive should just appear under Windows Disk Management (it may need a drive letter assigning) and you can then copy the data from it to another drive.

Good luck.