I have a user with an external hard drive that is no longer recognised: the drive letter does not appear in My Computer.
The drive is a Western Digital My Book Essential Edition (WD2500C032)
With help from the troubleshooting guide on the WD website, we have deduced that the most likely cause is a damaged or corrupt partition.
We have looked at the drive in Disk Management and the full volume appears as unallocated. We have also run SpinRite in recovery mode and that didn't turn up any defects, so the drive seems otherwise unharmed.
We would like to attempt to recover the data on the drive, and the WD site suggests "With a damaged partition, there is data recovery software that may restore the data. You can research the various kinds on the internet."
Not exactly the most helpful advice!
A quick search on Google yields a myriad of potential candidates, mostly commercial. The sheer number of offerings out there is bewildering. So can anyone offer any recommendations or experiences? Is it even worth trying? Have you ever successfully recovered a damaged partition on a drive, external or otherwise?