external drive damaged and unreadable

[camille88]

Hello,

My hard drive suddenly stopped working. Maybe after my friend that has a PC inserted it in her computer, that might not have been as protected as she thought. anyway.

when i plug my drive in, it says : the disk you inserted could not be read and i have as options "initiwalize", "ignore" or "eject...
i have dowloaded data rescue 3 but it would not scan my hard drive. I tried both scans.

I have then bought another hard drive, a 500GB like the other one, but a different brand and smaller.

I formated it (maybe it is "restored") and then i cloned the old hard drive on the new one. took 5 days but it was done. i tried to plug my new hard drive on the computer and it says the same message as before "could not ber read".

I then tried to scan it and it worked but i could only recover 222GB....

any ideas how i could do to have all the datas???
I am seriously not good with computers and trying to get better. I would welcome any help!

Thanks already,

Camille

 

[Makosuke]

If Data Rescue 3 can't salvage anything, the chances are very high that the only way you're going to get anything off the drive is sending it to a professional data recovery service. Those usually run on the order of several thousand dollars, so this is only a realistic option if you absolutely must have whatever is on the disk.

Sadly, as a general rule, it's not a matter of if a drive will fail, but when--it's a moving part, and an incredibly sensitive one at that. Having a backup is really the only thing you can do in the future.