External Hard Drive (WD Elements) is visible in PW but not in explorer

Your posts are confusing, In post #9, I could see your 1TB elements drive mentioned. Only message was No partition found.

In the next post you say that you had to remove the 1TB elements drive to get that screen. There is something amiss here.

Please do this.

Shut down your PC. Remove all external drives.

Reboot your PC. When Windows settles down, plug in your 1TB elements drive. Then plug in your Destination drive.

( Follow the instructions verbatim. Do not do anything else like opening My Computer, Windows Disk Management or Partition Wizard. TestDisk should be the only program to access the disks.)

Run TestDisk. First Screen No Log Enter.

Wait for TestDisk to find the disks. Post the screenshot of the second screen. I am online and we shal continue step by step.

In case I am absent or you are asleep, post the screenshot and then close TestDisk. We shall continue later, Is the local time shown correct? Are you in USA?

Sorry for confusing.. its like this.. When i plug the WD HDD and start the TestDisk app it just stays in the state "please wait.." when I unplug the WD HDD immediately TestDisk shows all the drives connected to the PC.. Then I plug the WD HDD again to PC and run the steps you advised me..

Furthermore, when I plug my WD HDD to PC and check task manager Disk Performance of WD Element is 100%

I'm from Sri Lanka.. So I guess we both in same time zone. :)

followed steps..

the partition displayed as below...



as advised I selected "list".. and for a long time it was like this..

After highlighting
[List] are you pressing the Enter Key ? The highlighted command is executed only when you press the Enter Key. Try it again but do not unplug your 1TB external HDD anytime. Allow sufficient time for TestDisk to respond. (Unplugging the external HDD without closing TestDisk and removing it safely with the safely remove icon may make matters worse.)

If it does not succeed in listing the files, then perhaps we may have to try some other method to recover the data.

Hi Jumamji.. files are copying.. guess it's a very slow process.. will keep posting.. [emoji6][emoji6]

jumanji not jumamji . The copying process may be slow . I suspect that the WDTV has corrupted the HDD in someway. As I already told people in a similar situation simply reformatted the HDD knowing not how to recover the data. I haven't come across any such case where data was recovered successfully. Once files are copied, close TestDisk and check the integrity of the data.

In the next step, I shall try to restore the disk. It may or may not succeed but having recovered the data in whatever form it is, we have nothing to lose.

my bad Jumanji... :)

Yeah it does have corrupted the HDD.. still in the TestDisk it shows as,



also it shows as 337 files are copied but there aren't any file in 'recovery' folder

Hi Jumanji.. I followed the same process.. there aren't any files at TestDisk Folder or Recovery Folder