HELP! After using Recuva I've lost my Hardrive

Recuva
1

Ok last night I was given a external hard drive to see if I could repair it. This external hard drive when plugged in to any computer was showing up in my computer, however it did not show how much storage it had/files etc. When you clicked on the drive to open it you would get prompted with (you need to format this drive to use it). So basically I come to the conclusion the drive was either Dead or Currupted. I downloaded the Recuva program to try and recover what I could. Recuver scanned the hard drive and found a heap of files, some of which could be recovered some which couldn't. It prompted me with were would I like to back these files up to. So I selected a secondary drive I currently have in my computer that's used to backup files. After the process had finished recuva managed to only get some of the files it said it could recover to this hard drive.

However the problem now is, whatever happend while recuva was transfering the files it seems to have buggered my internet backup hard drive. My secondary internal drive now keeps disappearing. When I first start up my computer the drive shows in my computer and manager etc. However after a short amount of time (anywere from 1 min to 5) it disappears. If I try to access the drive sometimes it opens, othertimes trying to do anything with it will cause it to freeze and then disappear again. I checked out my system log and have a bunch of errors now coming up for the drive. I'd say that when I transfered the files i could recover from the bad external hard drive to my internal drive it has somehow deleted necissary files to make it run or overwritten them. My problem is once the hard drive disappears I can no longer access it from anywere my computer, manager, bios nothing. I also can not get the information off the drive to another one because it only stays open for a few minutes so transfering files just stops.

If anyone can possibly help it would be much appretiated. For the sake of trying to save a friends photo's of her kids I've now also managed to proberbly loose 10yrs worth of mine if I can't get them off my drive. After a lot of googling most recomend a dead hard drive or to remove the hard drive etc but this can't be the problem as this only happend after using recuva.

2

Recuva uses legitimate Windows commands to read the files from the external drive and to write them to the secondary drive: the read/write operations are under the control of Windows. I can't see any condition when Recuva would damage system files or make a disk unstable. What errors are shown in the system logs?

If a disk fails mechanically there has to be some event that took place prior to the failure, but is not necessarily the proximate cause of he failure. Perhaps the burst of file writing (how many files were recovered?) triggered the disk failure.

How old is the disk if it has 10 years of data on it? If it is a mechanical failure then recovering any data could be expensive, as I'm sure you know.