My 1 TB external hard disc (WD - My Passport) stopped working and the NTFS table is corrupted so the drive is unreadable. I haven't formatted the drive so it shows up as RAW. I installed two programs to try to recover the data, iCare Professional and EaseUS Recovery.
Both tell me that the estimated time needed is between 1-4 months. I've left the computer running EaseUS for two days now. Progress dialog shows that it is indeed finding files.
But I can't wait either one month (much less four) for it to finish. Is there any way to make this faster?
If I format the drive in NTFS and run the recovery programs then will it be faster?
4 Answers
Data recovery on large volume drives can be such an agony especially if you are using window's tools to recover the same drive that windows is unable to read. I have had success recovering similar raw and unrecognized drives using linux distros as well. My suggestion: Download Ultimate Boot CD, make a bootable USB or CD of it. Boot from it and launch Parted Magic. Mount all partitions on the drive and see if you are able to access your lost files© them to another drive. If this fails, proceed with Testdisk as MOatz suggested in his comment. Testdisk&many other drive recovery tools are included in UBCD. It's your best bet. Best of Luck
1Data recovery takes a long time, especially if we're talking about a lot of data, and extra-especially if the drive is faulty/damaged. :)
All recovery programs will take about the same amount of time to do the same job.
Formatting the drive will only make it harder to recover data (since every time you write to the drive you most-likely overwrite some of the data you are trying to recover).
Alternative technique (for next time)? Make regular backups.
Data recovery can take a while, although I've never seen a hard drive have to take that long to be read from and repair. What kind of state is the drive in, is it making noises, does it report bad sectors, what happened to it to make the NTFS table corrupt?
I'd start by using a tool such as ddrescue (packaged in linux as gddrescue) and imaging the drive to another hard drive of equal or preferably larger size. Then once imaged you can use tools such as Testdisk or Photorec to recover the data (or even restore the file structure to the disk if your aim is to re-use the drive).
Alternatively you could employ the services of a data recovery firm. I own one, but will resist the urge to shamelessly plug :-)
3If you format the drive data recovery won't be faster. If you are sure that the original problem is with a corrupted NTFS table you could try using some kind of partition recovery software. However the best option is such cases it to use the services of a data recovery company. Data recovery is not an easy process and if you aren't a 100% sure what and why you are doing you might end up losing your data.
