My external drive isn't working in Windows 11

[Costa24]

Hello everyone!
My external hard drive has stopped working. The disc is no longer readable. When I connect the drive to my computer, the system asks me to format it.
It’s an HHD drive that was in FAT format, but now appears as RAW in the disc manager.
I have important files on the drive.
Can anyone help me?

[phillpower2]

Hello Costa24,

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but chances are you have lost most if not all of the data.

The most common cause of this is running out of free storage space on a drive and the data already there gets overwritten.

I hope that the data on the drive was your back up and that you still have the original and at least one other back up stored somewhere else like the Cloud.

Some example info provided by WD here

Before using a data recovery service I would try mounting the drive in Linux/Ubuntu.

[Bruce]

External drives by their nature get mistreated a lot more then their internal counterparts.
The is heightened with HDD’s as they have moving parts. And even a disconnected HDD with a parked head will not survive a waist high fall onto a footpath (been there - done that).

All drives go south eventually, that’s why backups were invented. (y)

A few things to double check - plug the external drive into another PC’s USB port.
And also remove the drive from the enclosure and connect the physical drive into another PC’s internal cables.
But, sadly as stated, you are more than likely looking at a dead drive.

If nothing already suggested bears fruit, you are looking at a data recovery process, either using free software like Recuva, or EASEUS Data Recovery, or Disk Drill, to name a few.
Be warned, these programs can take many hours to scan your drive and typically (in my experience) have a low success rate.

Your last resort would be a professional, forensic, data recovery lab - I’ve had feedback from people using these and prices have ranged from $950 to $3,500.
So the data has to be worth the expense.

And although the horse has bolted on this case - if you data is important, it needs to live in more than one location.

[phillpower2]

Being that the OP revisited the forum more than once but chose not to reply this thread will be marked and closed, there is a smell of spam about it in any event :unsure: