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I have a very old hard drive, a 320 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (image), with some important office files on it which I need to recover. However, when I try to connect the hard drive as a second hard drive in a desktop, it does not work. Disk Management prompts to select a partition style, but I when I try to read what partition style the hard drive is using it does not give any information about the hard drive. When I choose either, I get the following error:

The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

The computer does detect the hard drive, though, which gives me hope there still is a way to get my files back. How do I recover data from the drive?

Screenshot

bwDraco
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Jan van der Want
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  • I've never seen a drive misreport its size that badly. There's an extremely high chance the drive itself is at fault. – Journeyman Geek Dec 06 '16 at 07:10
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    **Don't reformat or reinitialize the drive.** Instead, extract an image of the drive using software like [ddrescue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddrescue) under Linux onto another drive (with at least 320 GB of free space), then run data recovery tools like [PhotoRec](http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec) on that image. – bwDraco Dec 06 '16 at 07:10
  • I agree about ddrescue, but Photorec is a file carver, it won't be very good if you care about file names (or directories). See [Recovering broken or deleted NTFS partitions](http://askubuntu.com/a/776317/271). – Andrea Lazzarotto Dec 06 '16 at 17:27

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Your hard disk has lost the partition table and/or the file system got corrupted. There are many reasons for this - usual reasons are virus attacks, formatting the hard disk and data corruption.

However you can recover the files. Windows cannot do it as far as I know. As the partition is lost, window cannot locate any data inside the hard disk, though data can actually be residing in the disk.

There are many recovery tools, both free and paid, which can help you to recover data from raw/corrupted disks. You can search and try the tools and find which one can recover your files. I have used "easeus data recovery", "getdata recover my files", "minitool" and in olden days I used paragon partition and data recovery tools.

sugaGenius
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