External HDD is corrupted and unreadable

I ran chkdsk /f and now I get the "inaccessible" message. Is there any way to recover this drive without losing all my video files that are on it?

1. What prompted you to run chkdsk /f on the external drive?

2. And yes, you should always post the Manufacturer, Model Name/number and capacity of the external drive and also the number of partitions in it.

3. Acer and HP PC/desktop Both are desktops????? Both have Windows 10???? 32bit/64 bit?????

Can you post screenshots of the drive in disk Management can you now see files with correct size?

Here's the screen shot. Properties come up but unable to open.
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@trembuzz,

Do you have another 3TB drive to back up all data in the faulty drive? If not, it is time to get one. Until you get one and are ready to do the data recovery, please remove your 3TB expansion drive safely and keep it aside. If you continue to run it, you run the risk of more data getting corrupted . The HDD may even fail totally. The drive not aceessible message is not to be taken lightly.

"When encountering the error "drive not accessible, the parameter is incorrect", experienced users will firstly think of recovering data and files from this drive, and then fix this error. " I shall follow this dictum. ( You already ran checkdisk but it only resulted in making your drive worse. So no more check disk.)

bro67 in his post #2 gave a solid piece of advice "You should have no problem seeing if you can get to the data with a Linux Live DVD." Thank him and I shall latch on to it.

This is what you will do:

1. Prepare a bootable live Lucid Puppy pendrive using Rufus 2.12 (928KB) Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way How to : My post #8 here Is there any way of saving a completely unrecognisable hard drive? Solved - Windows 7 Help Forums

2. Plug in your faulty external drive, the new 3TB external drive and then boot into Lucid Puppy by using the one time boot menu. If you see all your data in the faulty drive, copy all of it to the new 3TB external drive. How to: Go to the topic Recovering files from the non-bootable Internal Drive: in this thread Lucid Puppy way to recover files from a non-bootable computer . In your case it will be your faulty 3 TB expansion external drive.]

3. Once you have copied all the data, check your faulty drive with SeaTools for Windows. SeaTools | Seagate If it reports problems with that drive, do not blink. Discard the drive. It will no longer be safe to entrust any data to it.

Remember till you are ready to recover the data, do not use your 3TB expansion drive. Plug it out and keep it safely.

I kind of figured that this was the case and was ready to just write everything off but if there is a chance of recovery I will try. I'll order a new drive today and do some research on the Linux Live DVD thingy. Thank you for your help and will post later when the tools and hardware are in place.
t

jumanji said:

@trembuzz,

Do you have another 3TB drive to back up all data in the faulty drive? If not, it is time to get one. Until you get one and are ready to do the data recovery, please remove your 3TB expansion drive safely and keep it aside. If you continue to run it, you run the risk of more data getting corrupted . The HDD may even fail totally. The drive not aceessible message is not to be taken lightly.

"When encountering the error "drive not accessible, the parameter is incorrect", experienced users will firstly think of recovering data and files from this drive, and then fix this error. " I shall follow this dictum. ( You already ran checkdisk but it only resulted in making your drive worse. So no more check disk.)

bro67 in his post #2 gave a solid piece of advice "You should have no problem seeing if you can get to the data with a Linux Live DVD." Thank him and I shall latch on to it.

This is what you will do:

1. Prepare a bootable live Lucid Puppy pendrive using Rufus 2.12 (928KB) Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way How to : My post #8 here Is there any way of saving a completely unrecognisable hard drive? Solved - Windows 7 Help Forums

2. Plug in your faulty external drive, the new 3TB external drive and then boot into Lucid Puppy by using the one time boot menu. If you see all your data in the faulty drive, copy all of it to the new 3TB external drive. How to: Go to the topic Recovering files from the non-bootable Internal Drive: in this thread Lucid Puppy way to recover files from a non-bootable computer . In your case it will be your faulty 3 TB expansion external drive.]

3. Once you have copied all the data, check your faulty drive with SeaTools for Windows. SeaTools | Seagate If it reports problems with that drive, do not blink. Discard the drive. It will no longer be safe to entrust any data to it.

Remember till you are ready to recover the data, do not use your 3TB expansion drive. Plug it out and keep it safely.

Should I be creating a Fat32 or NTFS