I Did Something Bad To My External HDD's & Can't Access Them.

I took them out of their cases and they have worked perfectly on both the USB 2.0 Dock & the USB 3.0 Dock. That was a couple of years ago. I was told that the USB 3.0 electronics, on the board between the drive interface and the USB output socket, had failed. I have no idea myself but it sounds feasible.

I've done the same with a couple of USB drives and a NAS drive, it also was because the added interface in the cases had failed but the drives were still good. It could have been because the power supply part of that interface had the failure.

theoldfarter said:

Just a thought: If something is corrupted/missing from the drive we are working on & it needs to be replicated/replaced, I have another exact same drive that may be used as a source. They were manufactured a couple of months apart & have the exact same model & part numbers. Both are 2TB...

I have examined the Sector 0 map you had posted. Your single partition table is present and no problem. Sector 63 which is the Volume Boot Record is severely corrupted. This has to be rebuilt. There is no simple solution as I had thought of because of the severe corruption. On my Trial HDD I had purposely corrupted sector 2048 ( the VBR for my HDD). It became RAW in Windows Disk Management and "Other " in PW. Ran TestDisk, rebuilt the bootsector and the drive was back with all data in it. Provided there is no other corruption like corrupt MFT, your faulty drive can also be repaired.

Since you say that you have the same exact drive, post a screenshot of its sector 63. You can compare it with the corrupted sector 63. You can restore the corrupt sector 63 with the good sector 63. Your faulty drive should be back in business theoretically( again subject to the proviso nothing else is corrupt on your faulty drive.)

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With VBR restored, you should be able to access the disk. Safely remove the disk plug it in again and check.

Note:

1. If both Boot sector and Backup bootsector show as Bad, move the highlight to [Rebuild BS] and press Enter and proceed.

2. If both Boot sector and Backup boot sector are OK , then move the highlight to [ Repair MFT] and Press Enter and Proceed. In most cases TestDisk may fail to repair MFT. You may have to use commercial software such as Active@filerecovery, Getdataback,ZeroAssumptionRecovery to recover the data.

3. If both bootsector and Backup bootsector are OK and TestDisk declares MFT also is OK, then run"CHKDSK K: /f /v /r /x from an elevated Command Prompt. Note: Replace K: with the actual drive letter of the external drive" and that should fix your disk." Caution: Do not run this straightaway on a RAW disk. You should do this only after and if TestDisk declares boot sector, backup bootsector and MFT are OK.