Hard drive not working Windows 11

[Sánchez6996]

Hello!
My external hard drive is not working anymore. The disk is not readable anymore. When I connect the disk to my computer, the system asks me to format it.
I have important files stored on the disk.
Can anyone help me?

[krampak]

@Sánchez6996 Hello Sánchez6996. In these cases, what I usually do is disassemble the disk from the USB casing if it allows it and connect it directly by SATA to a PC. Then I run some utility to check for bad sectors like the HDD Regenerator from Hiren's Boot CD.
If it gets stuck and you can't recover anything, it's usually a bad sign. This is usually accompanied by a cyclical sound from the disk head (if you put your ear on the disk, you should be able to hear it), which indicates a physical problem with the disk.

Let's see if any other colleague knows of another utility, surely there are. Another possibility is that it's not a sector problem and it's the partition table. In this case, there is usually more luck since you just have to rebuild it. For this, you need to do a Rebuild MBR with some utility like AOEMEI Patition for example.

[Sánchez6996]

@krampak

I connected the drive to other computers with Windows and Linux. I even took the drive out of its packaging and connected it directly through the SATA interface, but it didn't work.

I managed to find a solution on the Internet.

First, I managed to create a copy of the damaged drive with the help of "HDD Raw Copy Tool".

I loaded "Hetman Partition Recovery", the program found my RAW drive and ran a full scan. It found most of my files and recovered them successfully. Of course, not all files could be recovered, but I was lucky: I was able to recover the most important ones.