I’m reaching out because I’m currently facing an issue with my WD Elements 2TB external hard drive. Recently, when I connected it to my PC, I received a pop-up message saying the drive needs to be formatted before it can be used. Of course, I canceled the prompt because formatting would mean losing all my data, which includes years of personal files and important work documents.
The drive is detected in File Explorer, but it shows up as having no capacity (0 bytes). I’ve tried accessing it on multiple systems, including a Mac, but the problem persists. I’ve also run CHKDSK, but it didn’t resolve the issue and instead returned an error about unreadable sectors.
Has anyone else experienced something like this? If so, could you share any advice or tools that might help me recover the data safely? Additionally, should I consider sending the drive to a professional recovery service, or is there still hope for a DIY solution?
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your support!
When a drive shows 0 bytes and asks to be formatted, it usually means the file system is corrupted or the drive is failing. Since CHKDSK returned errors about unreadable sectors and you’ve already tested it on multiple systems, it’s safe to say this isn’t a simple connection issue. The good news is, there’s still a chance to recover your data using specialized data recovery software—just make sure you don’t format the drive or write anything new to it.
DIY recovery Software like Stellar Data Recovery is worth trying, as they can scan drives even when the file system is damaged. However, because the drive is showing 0 bytes and unreadable sectors, the success of DIY software depends heavily on how badly the drive is damaged. If the data is very important and you don’t want to risk further damage, it’s safer to consult a professional data recovery service—they have the tools to safely extract data from failing or partially dead drives
