I am not a computer-savvy person at all so nothing I have found online has helped me because of the technical jargon that makes no sense in my brain. I have had my Passport for over a year and then suddenly it didn’t appear one day. The Unlock still worked, but even though I entered my password, nothing would happen. My actual files never appeared. After waiting and trying for a month, I finally grew desperate and Googled what to do online. I WAS SO STUPID. I think I accidentally erased my entire external hard drive. This is heartbreaking to me. I’m sure this happens to people all the time, but that hard drive held my entire life for the past 4 years. I know it’s my fault for not being technologically-savvy but I am desperate to get my files back. It has pictures and documents and everything.
Now I can see an actual hard drive after typing in my passport, but it just says “Untitled.” I have no idea how to get my things back. IT’S EMPTY. IT’S GONE.
I tried updating Partitions, resizing, blindly following Youtube videos. I’ve been trying for hours. I don’t really know what I’m doing. I looked at data recovery sites but I don’t know how they work and I tried downloading some. Please give me some tips or tell me what to do. THank you so much.
After finally finding this community board I feel so sad because I feel like I could have fixed it without deleting everything. I understand if the damage is irreparable but if you have any ideas please let me know. I can’t just go to an Apple store or anything too, because I’m currently living overseas.
Hello and welcome to the WD Community.
As a recommendation, try using a data recovery software as this might help you recovering your files.
Stop doing anything with the drive. Turn it off and leave it off. You have been doing more and more damage.
If you can afford it, there are professional data recovery companies that could probably recover a great deal of your data. But they are very expensive. Just Google “hard drive data recovery” and find one close to you, or one your can ship the drive to for recovery. But get a quote or ask how much it will be before doing it, or you will get a shock.
If you can’t afford to do that, based on what you have written you should NOT get data recovery software and try to recover the data yourself. Find a technically competent person who can help you to recover the data using data recovery software. They may have to remove the hard drive from the MPW in order to do the recovery, or they may be able to do it using the USB connection. If I was doing it, I would removed the drive and direct connect it to a PC via SATA. It will still cost you quite a bit for the software, probably, but if you know someone who can help you for free, it won’t bankrupt you. If you do this, you may get back quite a bit of your data, or due to your fiddling (resizing partitions!!!) you may get very little.
If you try to do a recovery yourself using either free or purchased recovery software, you will probably recover very little data, and quite possibly none.
Whether you recover your data or not, you should learn from this that a backup of important data is critical. You need to learn enough that you can manage and run backups of all your data in future. There are plenty of PC courses available to teach you how, or again, use your technically savvy friends to help you.
