Recover data from damaged external hard drive

Most of us tend to rely on the USB storage device to store all of out personal files, like work files, learning materials, photos and other important data. When we need to use the data, we can can easily access the data as it’s very convenient to be connected with other device with the USB port. However, there are some cases you cannot use your data on the storage device.

How to deal with the external hard drive that is not accessible?

Sometimes, when you plug your external hard drive into your laptop, it does recognized by your computer and you can find the drive letter in Computer. But when you click to access it, it may tell you that, D:\ is not accessible. Then you are unable to access all the data on the external hard drive. Then what can we do to solve this problem?

That is not always a serious problem for your external drive, so you should not give up your drive and the data on the drive. You still have great chance to repair the drive and recover the data.

There are many possible causes for this problem.

You have plugged the external hard drive in an improper way. So you can try to re-plug it or change another USB port.

Wrong file system

Virus infection of drive

Physical damage on the drive

Power related issues for the drive

To recover data from the not accessible external hard drive, you should recover the data first. If you directly fix the inaccessible problem, it may cause data loss. As the data recovery service provided by professional recovery companies are very high, you can take the data recovery software. As long as the data on the drive have not been overwritten, you can easily restore them.

External Hard Drive Data Recovery How to retrieve deleted files

Then you can start to fix the inaccessible drive. According the different causes, you can take corresponding solutions.

The two most common used method are CHKDSK and format. Use the chkdsk to check the error on the external hard drive to find the causes and try to fix it. After you have restored your data on the external hard drive, you can format the drive. Formatting is an effective way to fix most of data loss cases. But you should remember to back up or restore your data at any time you are planing to format your device.