Recuva left my external ghard drive inaccessible

Recuva
1

Hi

I was using Recuva to recover files from a crashed PC, I had placed the drive in a caddy and was running the program from my laptop and writing the recovered files to an external hard drive. Recuva took 10.5 hours to recover the files across to the external drive, however when it completed I found that the external drive was inaccessible. This is a bit of a problem as I had a lot of my own work on this drive and was only using it as I had a lot of free space in which to place the recovered files.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? Is there a way to make this drive accessible again and retrieve the data?

Thanks in advance

2

Does the external drive show up in disk management?

What operating system?

3

The drive does show in disk management but it is formatted as RAW.

I'm using Windows 7 home. Thanks

4

Did you remove the external at any time without doing the 'safely remove hardware' routine?

Have a coffee and read below, the bit about how to use testdisk. It's the only thing I can think of at the moment.

It describes how to do it all and has pictures (very helpful!)

http://html5.litten.com/updated-how-to-fix-external-disk-drive-suddenly-became-raw/

5

The drive wasnt removed improperly at any time. It was operating fine when the Recuva process was started and was visible as normal right up until it completed. Only once Recuva had finished writing the files to the drive did it appear as RAW. I'll try TestDisk as you suggested but it'll probably be a few days before I get the chance to do it.