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?

[frankr2994]

It has been forever since I've used fat16. Does this happen to be a very old drive? Was it purchased as an external drive already in a USB enclosure or do you have it attached with a USB dock?
I can't even find for absolute certainly that win 11 supports fat16. You may be able to boot up a live version of gparted and pull the files off to a new drive.

[stormsonweathers]

Is the drive making any "clicking" sounds? And how old is it? Depending on those two factors it's gonna be a lost cause unless you take it to a recovery specialist which be be costly.
There are some tools available you can try (I need to get the links for you) but it's better assume lost than recovered...

EDIT
EaseUS Partition Recovery was something I used to use in the past (the last time i've used it was maybe 6 years ago, so it may be no longer a valid choice). Testdisk is a good recovery program if you feel comfortable in using a console based program...

https://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

If you feel uncomfortable in using these kind of tools, and your data is valuable, my recommended recourse is to have a recovery specialist do the data recovery for you.

[Costa24]

I connected the drive to other Windows and Linux computers. I even took the disc out of its packaging and connected it directly via the SATA interface, but it didn't help. CHKDSK does not work on a raw disc.

I managed to find a solution on the Internet.

I found this article and followed it step by step.

https://hetmanrecovery.com/recovery_new ... g-data.htm
Data Recovery Software For RAW File System

It cost me $97.95, but that's nothing compared to sending the disc to a specialist. I risked losing my files forever. But I can't afford to pay a lot of money.

Now I'd like to tell you how I proceeded.

First of all, I managed to create a copy of the damaged disc using the "HDD Raw Copy Tool".

I downloaded "Hetman Partition Recovery", the program found my RAW drive and started a full scan. It found most of my files and successfully recovered them. Of course, not all files could be recovered, but I was lucky: it managed to recover the most important ones.

And yes, make copies of important files (discs) for the future.

[Costa24]

Is the drive making any "clicking" sounds? And how old is it? Depending on those two factors it's gonna be a lost cause unless you take it to a recovery specialist which be be costly.
There are some tools available you can try (I need to get the links for you) but it's better assume lost than recovered...

EDIT
EaseUS Partition Recovery was something I used to use in the past (the last time i've used it was maybe 6 years ago, so it may be no longer a valid choice). Testdisk is a good recovery program if you feel comfortable in using a console based program...

https://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

If you feel uncomfortable in using these kind of tools, and your data is valuable, my recommended recourse is to have a recovery specialist do the data recovery for you.

There were no disc sounds. The disc is about 12 years old WD.

[frankr2994]

And yes, make copies of important files (discs) for the future.

I'm glad you got back the important stuff.
You should set up some sort of redundancy with your file system. Multiple big disk are cheap and usually easy to use if your already using a workstation style PC.

Other than that you should look into backblaze. I think it's 9 dollars a month to backup a single machine. Storage space is unlimited. If you need to restore from that backup they will send you a drive/drives in the mail. You only pay a deposit on the drives they send you and you get 100 percent of it back when you mail it back. And no ingress fees.

[Costa24]

And yes, make copies of important files (discs) for the future.

I'm glad you got back the important stuff.
You should set up some sort of redundancy with your file system. Multiple big disk are cheap and usually easy to use if your already using a workstation style PC.

Other than that you should look into backblaze. I think it's 9 dollars a month to backup a single machine. Storage space is unlimited. If you need to restore from that backup they will send you a drive/drives in the mail. You only pay a deposit on the drives they send you and you get 100 percent of it back when you mail it back. And no ingress fees.

Thank you for the important recommendations)

[stormsonweathers]

Agreed with Frank, glad you were able to get your data recovered. The amount you paid was cheaper than the cost of a recovery company doing it, but now you can keep backups of what you have!

Glad you got it resolved! I'll mark your post so that others can look into it if it happens.