How to recover files from external hard drive

There are many data loss happen on external hard drive, and the causes for data loss are various. Before you start to recover files on external hard drive, you should make clear that what happened on your external hard drive.

1. The external hard drive cannot be recognized

If your external hard drive cannot be recognized, you should try to fix this problem. In most of cases, it is for the USB port, driver or drive letter conflicts problems.

2. The external hard drive is dead

Your dead drive is not always really dead.  If it is for virus infection, USB problems or power supply issue, you can solve this by yourself. If you doubt that you have a dead external hard drive, you should take it to the data recovery company for repair and recovery.

3. The external hard drive is accidentally formatted

If you had formatted the external hard drive, you should not reformat it.

4. The error message

When you try to open an external hard drive, it prompts the messages like: The disk X id not formatted. Do you want to format it now? When you format the disk,it prompts that Windows was unable to complete the format.

Not in all case, you can recover files with a data recovery software. Physical damage such as bad sectors on external hard drive, the data on bad sectors cannot be recovered

How to recover files from external hard drive without formatting?

Formatting helps you to repair some external hard drive problems. But at the same time, formatting will delete your files on hard drive. If you reformat the drive, the success rate of your data recovery will be greatly reduced. You can use cmd to try to repair the external hard drive without formatting. If you have to format you hard drive to fix the external drive, you must recover all the files on the drive first.

How to recover files from external hard drive?

If you have to use a data recovery software, you must not have any backup on other devices. If you can repair your external hard drive problems without data loss, you are lucky. However, if you cannot access to your files before formatting it, you also should not directly format it. As long as the external hard drive show up in Disk Management, the data recovery software can scan and recover the residue data.

Maintenance your external hard drive is as important as backup. No matter where you store your files, backup is the best way to secure your data. Learn some maintenance skills will extend the lifespan of your device and greatly reduce your chance of data loss.