A few days ago I noticed my Passport Essential 500GB was running very slow, it would take an hour or 2 to get into certain folders, some times it would just disconnect and restart.
It gradually got worse and I tried using file scavenger to save my files but it was unable to do the job.
Now when I plug it in, the light comes on, and the unlock program drive F shows up, sometimes I can get the unlock program to run, but whenever I enter the password right, it freezes, shuts down and restarts.
I ran WD’s analyzer on it and it said it has too many bad sectors.
I ran chkdsk on it and it says it can’t access the volume because the storage drive isn’t showing up on my computer anymore. Sometimes it will access it and say it has problems, but when I add the /f to fix them, it says Windows can’t run chkdsk because it is write protected, most of the time it can’t even get that far though.
I don’t have the money to send it to a lab to recover 70GB of information and spend $500 - $1000 dollars.
I’ve tried several data recovery programs but nothing so far has worked, please can anyone help?
The drive CAN be recognizd by Windows Disk Manager but I don’t know what to do with it, it can’t be found by any other data recovery program other than Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery and I can’t do anything about it in that program, I did a long scan but nothing happened
I haven’t tried either yet, I’m trying a program called Zero Assumption Recovery right now, at least this one can read the drive and in it’s scan it’s finding bad sectors, no data fragments yet, but it’s taking a VERY long time, it’s been 5 hours and it’s only on 32%
If this yields no results then I will continue with your advice and type out my results
Also, I’ve tried Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery, and now I’m just learning people have reported it permanantly deletes data if you use it, I hope it didn’t, I ran a scan but it did absolutely nothing, I haven’t used the program since
I tried testdisk, it couldn’t recognize the drive, I ran Zero Assumption recovery and it detected about 98% of it was bad sectors, and said the data can’t be retrieved from bad sectors, I’m assuming creating a disk image wouldn’t help either, I guess it’s to a lab then for around $1500 right?
