Unrecognized external Hard drive

philbr41 · 10 Oct 2019

I have a 4TB hard drive that was previously setup in a Shuttle OMNINAS KD20 NAS with another 4Tb drive. In the NAS they were setup as JBOD. One day you could see the files on the drives, the next day you couldn't. I pulled both drives and attempted to recover the files using an Orico SATA HDD Docking Station connected to my laptop.
The first drive was visible to Windows but the file were not. I used EaseUS Data Recovery Software to recover most of the files on the disk. The second drive, however, when inserted in the docking station just runs and never stops. The drive light on the docking station just keeps blinking like something is attempting to read from the disk and never stops. Windows 10 does not recognize the disk either in computer management or file explorer.
I have used the docking station to work on other drives recently without problems so I don't suspect a problem with it. I rebooted my laptop to see if that had anything to do with it but without success.
Is there anything else I can do to try and get the drive recognized in Windows? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

EdTittel · 10 Oct 2019

Look for a factory reformat utility from the drive's maker. It may be able to regain access. If not, you may need to take it to a PC shop to see if they can access the drive. It's probably NOT worth the $200+ it would cost to bring in professional data recovery firms to help.
HTH,
--Ed--

spunk · 10 Oct 2019

The drive light on the docking station just keeps blinking....Windows 10 does not recognize the disk either

This is a sign the drive has failed.Being that this drive came from a NAS, and since Drive #1 files are recoverable, it sounds like the NAS had set up two drives as RAID 1 Mirror, where disk 1 holds the data, and disk 2 is a Mirror copy of the files on drive 1.. If you would have just replaced the failed drive in the NAS and booted into the RAID controller control panel in the NAS you could have restored the RAID array and be back in business.
Usually NAS's might be setup as RAID 0 Striped set, where two drives are spanned across each other to make 1 large drive. but if one drive fails, you cannot recover any data off of the first drive.
Unfortunately, since the drive cannot be recognized in Disk Management by the computer, there is no software program that will recognize the drive to Format it.to make it useful again.