WD recovery

[sinbad]

My WD harddrive started playing up - slowing down, becoming unrecognizable to the computer for some periods of time. Finally it stopped being to the computer at all which said it needed to be formatted.
I used EASEUS data recovery to get alot of data of the HD but about halfway i realized that the movies (legal) being recovered would not play at all. So i cancelled the recovery. I want to try with another program but now it cant even see the harddrive to recover (it did before). Even EASEUS cant even see the harddrive anymore.

So basically two questions

1. Is there a way i can make the harddrive able to be seen in these data recovery programs (again).

2. Is there a way to view the countless (legal) video filed recovered. They are full sized but when i open them in vlc the video doesn't show.

 

[omniscence]

That sounds like a malfunction of the drive mechanics and/or electronics. But check/exchange the drive cabling first. Sadly there is not much you can do, if your computer has problems with drive detection. Are there any errors showing up in the Windows event log?

I think your best chance is a data recovery service, but this is extremely expensive and I doubt that you data is worth that much.

 

[sub.mesa]

If you have a free drive of at least the same capacity, i would transfer as much data to that new drive and try recovery software on there, with no bad sectors or any other kind of hardware failure. the problem likely will be that you cannot copy all sectors due to damage, in that case Spinrite can help.

After copying everything, running chkdsk to repair NTFS metadata can help to make your video files playable again.

 

[drescherjm]

i would transfer as much data to that new drive

You are talking about bit for bit copying using something like dd or ddrescue correct?

 

[molicasolis]

If it is malfunction of the drive mechanics and/or electronic, the chances are very litter. If not, try Card Data Recovery. It is a nice data recovery tool.