External USB Hard Drive Problem

[reb78]

I have a Freecom external USB hard drive - Its 1TB in size. I don't have a recent backup (Doh).

Plugged it in today to get a file and it didn't show up in explorer. It does show up in disk management but no drive is allocated and it wont let me allocate one.

I have tried unistalling and reinstalling the drivers for the device but no joy.

Any ideas? The pic below shows it as Disk 1 - but you can see no drive is allocated to the main partition. I allocated drive D and it allowed that and detects it but the main partition with all my data on doesnt show up and as you can see the option to allocate a drive letter isnt available.

 

[Kayos]

Id try swapping to a new usb enclosure/adapter

Is it a mechanical hard drive?

 

[reb78]

Thanks Kayos

Its one of these: https://www.freecom.com/product/tough-drive-HDD-2tb-56331/

Have tried all USB ports on my laptop (windows 10) and my old work machine (windows 7) now but no joy.

 

[ukracer]

Thanks Kayos

Its one of these: https://www.freecom.com/product/tough-drive-HDD-2tb-56331/

Have tried all USB ports on my laptop (windows 10) and my old work machine (windows 7) now but no joy.

It's either the freedom interface (if you are lucky) or duff drive.
And reading that it sounds like it's encrypted. . But I will let the experts comment more.

 

[reb78]

I am not hopeful - because it let me create the drive D from some unallocated space on the screenshot, I reckon the drive is probably duff?

 

[voipio]

Is there a chance it was disconnected before finishing writing to disk? I've had windows taskbar say it's safe to remove the hardware after deleting a load of files, and ended up trashing the drive because it hadn't truly finished.

 

[fizzy]

Run Crystaldisk info to check the health of the drive.
You could run linux mint off a usb - then mount the drive and look at the partitions - You should be able to get your data.

 

[Ross365]

Sadly, I have to tell you that I had Freecom external drive for backups; for no apparent reason, it just died. Never had any other drive do that.

 

[reb78]

So, the good news is that I picked up my other half's USB drive by mistake.... so mine isn't corrupt/broken! The bad news (for her) is that it still wont open. BUT, there is a chance that this has only been used/formatted etc on a Mac so perhaps it has some weird non-compatible apple system on it as we all know how they like to ensure their products/OS/apps etc are not easily cross compatible with anything else out there.... I am away from home for a few days but will plug it into her Mac when i get back and see what happens. I also have Linux Mint on the workshop PC so can try it there too.

 

[Newlands]

If it’s a Mac-formatted disk it will probably be an APFS or a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. A Linux box will almost certainly be able to read it unless the drive controller is faulty (in which case @Kayos has addressed this above) - I’ve successfully rescued data from drives that Windows has refused to read or mount in the past.

 

[reb78]

Thanks All. I will update once I have had access to a Mac and a Linux machine! At least it isnt my disk!!! BUT I will back that up more often as this has made me realise there is data on it that I havent backed up!