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  • #3961089

    usb external HDD to get wiped & Unreadable !

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    by judy85805 ·

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    usb external HDD got wiped & Unreadable !
    was caused by loose connection in my digital set top box —
    its a 930 gig HDD I hade family photos & videos – 610gig of all gone

    computer disk management – says 930gig Unallocated . so this means its Unrecoverable , right ??
    Also the drive letter does not show anymore in Explorer- do I have to reformat the Harddrive ?? or is it possible to still recover those 610gig family photo & video ?? and How ??

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    • #3961090
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      Re: recovering

      by kees_b ·

      In reply to usb external HDD to get wiped & Unreadable !

      Recovering is never guaranteed, so it’s best to have a backup of what you don’t want to lose; that is a second copy on some other drive or in the cloud.

      That being said, try a recovery program like Recuva (from Piriform) or another program your favorite search engine (like Google or Bing) finds. A good search term is PARTITION RECOVERY.
      Some of these progams are shareware, but only pay for it if their demo mode shows it will do something. Most will do an in-place recovery, others might have the option to copy the recovered files to another location (like your future backup disk).

      It’s recommended to make a full (sector by sector) image backup of the current hard disk to another one and let the recovery programs try to do their work on that copy. Than, if they fail half way, a new program you try can work on a new copy in stead of a possibly corrupted old copy.

      If you feel this is beyond your comfort zone, find a data recovery company to do it for you. But that isn’t free, of course.

    • #3961108
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      Bad news.

      by rproffitt ·

      In reply to usb external HDD to get wiped & Unreadable !

      I’ve seen this complaint before from folk that took a drive and plugged it into a smart TV and the drive is prepared without the user being told (remember this is the claim and I won’t debate if the TV or box did it without asking.)

      This means as Kees noted our only defense are good backups. You can try Recuva but if the data is overwritten, it’s gone. No company today can recover what’s been overwritten.

      • #3961576

        Reply To: usb external HDD to get wiped & Unreadable !

        by judy85805 ·

        In reply to Bad news.

        I used Testdisk to recover my albums.

        I now made backup copies. That digital set top box – alot of them have bad Loose connections – if the connection for usb is not perfect they can short out – I believe that is what may have happened.

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