I've had a WD external hard drive for a while, all of a sudden a couple of weeks ago it stopped working.
When I plug it in, windows prompts me to "Format Disk",
I also tried it from linux mint, but it can't read it either.
The file system on the disk is marked "RAW".
I have some important stuff there that I don't want to lose. I tried tools that recover deleted files, like Recuva, but they didn't find anything.
Any clues are highly appreciated.
Update
The data is important and I hope I can recover it, but I wouldn't spend $10k, not even $100 for it. Plus it contains some pretty "private" stuff and I wouldn't trust anyone with it.
So I'm looking for a software solution.
I was assuming/hoping that maybe just some headers got corrupted and can somehow be recovered.
Update 2
For the record, the file system on the hard was FAT32 (sucks, I know).
and it's way bigger than my (internal) hard drive. (500 GB vs 100 GB)
Update 3
So far, the only thing working is DiskDigger, but it's a bit too unpractical, as it gives tens of files without names or paths.
Data Recovery Wizard seemed to work, but it's not free. (I just let it run for about 10 minutes to see if it got any results and it seemed to have found some files).
Best Answer
Take it out the enclosure, connect it directly to your computer.
I've had a similar problem a few times, once because the enclosure had died, another because the drive was not connected properly.. Both times the drive was fine