Your drive showing up in Disk Utility/Disk Management and with the correct storage size is a great sign! Now before reading along, please power down your drive and put it aside to prevent more damage while we provide you more information about the situation.
This issue is by far one of the most common issues we see here at Five Star Data Recovery. Here are some common causes:
- Drive has bad sectors or very faint signs of media damage.
- Drive is developing firmware corruption and is in the early phases.
- Drive was ejected improperly and the file system is damaged.
But the most important question here is, how do you get your data back? And the answer is simple. Contact the Professionals at Five Star Data Recovery or any other Data Recovery Professional. Please do not go in the direction of computer repair or IT companies. Yes they will be more affordable, but you are giving your data a 50/50 chance. If the situation is not too horrible, the computer repair company will be able to recover your data using software. If the situation is more severe, then the software that the computer repair company will use will spread the tiny microscopic scratch into a huge scratch, deeming the data unrecoverable even by professionals like ourselves. There is no way the software can know how serious the issue is until it tries to recover the data, but then it may be too late.
Professional Data Recovery labs like ourselves have special equipment that are designed to work with drives such as these and honestly with drives in even worse condition. This issue is really a walk in the park for us, as long as we get the case early enough. Once these cases have been to a repair company or IT professional and then come to us, its pretty much a salvage case where we’d be lucky to recover bits and pieces after all the damage.