Windows has a bad bug, that if your external drive locks up while running, or accessing it, & you are forced to hard set it with the power switch, you can & probably WILL lose your partition info & suddenly your drive shows up blank? Raw format? No drive letter?
Unfortunately, as good as Recuva is, it doesn't recover from these drives...
I have one now, years of work, how I wish it would recover files from a drive like that!
Don't have to rebuild the partition, but maybe it can show "raw" drives?
Thanks!