Recuva has bricked my external hard drive

[itsfatboyjim]

Does anyone have any suggestions?!

My hard drive was visible and I started the Recuva process, but it failed and now I can no longer see my hard drive.

Not happy!

Please help.

[nukecad]

It may be possible to get things back again, even when a drive cannot be seen by Windows.

But more details would be needed before anyone could give the best/right suggestions for what to do now.

Please give as much of this as you can:

Type of drive, HDD, SSD, other?
Capacity of drive in GB/TB?
Make/model of drive?
How had the drive been formated? NFTS,FAT, other?
Which OS (Windows version) is being used?

Why were you attempting a recovery from the drive? (Accidentally deleted files, accidentaly reformated drive, crashed drive, other?)
What type of files were you trying to recover?
Was it all the files on the drive that you were trying to recover, or just some of them?
Were you using the Recovery Wizard or Advanced options? In either case what had you set to be scanned/recovered?

How did it 'fail' - what had you already done and what was happening when it 'failed'?
Did you have any error messages from Recuva or from Windows?

[itsfatboyjim]

1 hour ago, nukecad said:

Thanks nukecad - please bear with me.

Type of drive, HDD, SSD, other?
Capacity of drive in GB/TB? 2TB
Make/model of drive? WD
How had the drive been formated? NFTS,FAT, other?
Which OS (Windows version) is being used? Windows 11

Why were you attempting a recovery from the drive? (Accidentally deleted files, accidentaly reformated drive, crashed drive, other?) The drive is from a MyBookLive - it stopped responding over wifi via a router
What type of files were you trying to recover? All docs/photos/music
Was it all the files on the drive that you were trying to recover, or just some of them? All
Were you using the Recovery Wizard or Advanced options? In either case what had you set to be scanned/recovered? Used the wizard - all files - specific drive - then off it went

How did it 'fail' - what had you already done and what was happening when it 'failed'? Just stopped
Did you have any error messages from Recuva or from Windows?

 

[Andavari]

If the drive was already having issues it could be a coincidence using Recuva or any other recovery tool could further give it issues when scanning the drive.

Could possibly be that if the drive was already having issues and it could've went into RAW format, i.e.; all of the files could still be there, but there's no filesystem that Windows recognizes which can be a problem with Windows since decades ago.

If it's a RAW format issue which is "probably the easiest to fix" without losing files do note that there are other freeware recovery tools (not Recuva) that can convert RAW into a readable filesystem that Windows can read from, and Windows itself may be able to do it.

[nukecad]

A MyBooklive is a particular type of NAS drive, I don't believe that Recuva could recover data from it.
(I don't think any recovery software available to the home user could?)

I do note that when there was a hack of them in 2021, which wiped many of them, the affected drives had to be sent back to WD to have the data recovered from them.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/hackers-exploited-0-day-not-2018-bug-to-mass-wipe-my-book-live-devices/

PS. I'm not suggesting that you may have been hacked, I'm just pointing out that the drives had to be sent back to WD for recovery of the data.
If available recovery software could have done the job then they would probably have done it that way rather having them all sent back.