A friend of mine dropped off a WD Portable 2TB with me that has failed, it shows in Windows as unallocated and can be seen by the 5 restore tools I’ve tried, in every case it finds loads of photos but they are all corrupted and won’t open, am I missing a trick here or is the disk finished with?
What does the output from
chkdsk #: /Xlook like? (# is the target volume letter)If all else fails, SpinRite. If that can’t recover the data, probably nothing can.
Try to create a disk image using ddrescue. Then you can try to mount the image, repair the filesystem on the image and extract files from it.
Never work directly with a bad hdd, except to image it while mounted read-only. The hdd is likely to deteriorate as you work with it.
Try mounting the drive in a Live Linux distro. Otherwise it’s time for professional recovery.
Unlike Seagate portables, which are regular SATA drives with a detachable USB interface, WD and Toshiba portables have the USB jack and interface integrated into the mainboard, requiring expensive, $$$ modding for data receovery.