Summary :

Disk Drill – Best Overall Hard Drive Repair Software. Choosing the best overall hard drive repair. Western digital hard drive repair software, WD my Passport repair tool to fix Western Digital external hard drive corrupted and unreadable,Western Digital hard drive not formatted,Western Digital external hard drive not recognized, not working,Western Digital hard drive not showing up in Windows 7 Windows 10 PC, power failure, logical.

Hard drives can run into problems sometimes. This article will show you how to make hard drive repair and recover data from a hard drive. When your hard drive needs to be repaired, you can try the top 4 solutions in this article to fix the hard drive.

How to Recover Data from Western Digital Hard Drive. Updated on Febraury 4, 2020. Lost data from your WD external hard drive? Here is a tool that helps in Recovering deleted, lost or formatted files from various Western Digital hard disk models such as WD My Passport, My Passport Ultra, WD Elements Desktop and other models quickly. Then, a list of physical and logical drives available in the system are displayed. Now, choose your Western Digital hard drive from the list and click 'Scan' button to initiate scanning. Figure 1: Welcome Screen. 2: Now the software scans the western Digital hard drive to find lost/deleted partitions. Disk Genius is one of the most popular hard disk management tools among IT.

When your hard drive is corrupt or you encounter other hard drive errors, the data on the hard drive can be inaccessible and unreadable. How to make hard disk repair Windows 10? If you don't know any solutions, this article can be a big help.

The following contents will show you some ways to make HDD repair. Before you try the following solutions, you can try some simple fixes to repair the disk errors. For example, try to unplug the internal drive and connect it again to see if Windows can read your storage device. You can also try another USB port on your computer if your hard drive is external.

If simple fixes cannot help you, then you can follow the methods in this post to make hard disk repair Windows 10 by yourself.

Solution 1. Reinstall Your Hard Drive’s Driver

If your computer cannot read your external hard drive, you can connect it to another PC to see if the drive can be read and work normally. If it works, you can make external hard drive repair by reinstalling the device drivers on your computer. Here are detailed steps for you to reinstall your hard drive's drivers.

Step 1. Input Device Manager in the Windows 10 Cortana search box and click on the best match to open the device manager.

Step 2. Locate Disk drives and double click it.

Step 3. Then you will see all disks on your computer displayed here. Right-click the hard disk with hard drive failure and then click Uninstall device to uninstall the drive.

Step 4. Restart the computer and connect the hard drive. The drivers will start installing automatically in most cases.

After restarting, you can check if your external hard drive can be read. If this solution doesn't work, you can try the next method.

Solution 2. Check and Fix Hard Drive Errors with Disk Repair Tool

You can use a professional HDD repair tool to fix hard drive issues. There are many wonderful third-party hard disk repair software that you can use to diagnose and fix hard drive issues. Be sure to choose a reliable one.

Here I recommend you to choose the third-party disk utility - MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition. It is the professional hard drive repair software & an all-in-one partition manager, which can help you check and fix hard drive errors in just a few clicks.

The MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition can also help you manage computer hard drives in a flexible way with its features like extend partition, resize partition, format partition, migrate OS to SSD/HD, copy disk, convert MBR to GPT and so on.

So the free hard disk repair tool is worth trying. Now let's see the detailed steps.

Step 1. Download the disk utility MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition by clicking the following button. Install it on your computer and launch it to get the main interface.

Step 2. Then select the partition on a hard disk and choose Check File System on the left action panel.

Step 3. As you can see, here are two options for you to choose from. The option Check only will only scan your hard drive for errors but it will not fix detected file system errors automatically. The option Check and fix detected errors will scan the drive and fix any file system errors found. To make hard drive repair, please select Check & fix detected errors and click Start.

Step 4. After the hard drive repair is completed, you can close the program.

Solution 3. Repair Hard Disk Errors with CHKDSK Utility

If the above fixes cannot help you fix the errors, you can run the Windows CHKDSK utility with CMD (via admin mode) to perform hard drive repair on Windows 10. You can access the Windows 10 disk utility via command prompt. Here are detailed steps.

Step 1. To access the Windows built-in hard drive repair tool, type cmd in the Windows 10 Cortana search box. Then right-click the best match then choose Run as administrator.

Step 2. In the Command Prompt window, type CHKDSK *: /f /r (* represents the drive letter of the specific drive that you want to repair) and then hit Enter. With this command, the hard drive is analyzed track-by-track to detect and fix recoverable data on the defective areas. It will give you all the details here.

The commonly used parameters /f and /r have different meanings:

• /f – fix any errors it detected.
• /r – Locate bad sectors on the drive and try to recover any and all readable information from them.

Step 3. After the error checking is completed, you can type exit to close the command prompt window.

This way should help you fix hard drive errors effectively. If your hard drive is working properly, you can backup important files as soon as possible. Sometimes the dead drive just occurs without notice.

Solution 4. Format the Hard Drive

Another effective method to eliminate hard drive errors is to format the hard drive. As you know, a hard drive can become RAW due to virus attack, improper operations, bad sectors or power outage. In this case, you are unable to access the hard drive data. You can format the hard drive to fix the error.

However, if you just format the hard drive directly, all files will be deleted including important files in it. So the best way is to recover the data to another drive with a piece of professional hard drive recovery software firstly. Then format the drive with a professional drive formatting tool.

Recover Data Before Formatting the Drive

To make internal hard drive data recovery, my recommendation is to use reputable and reliable hard drive recovery software MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Ultimate.

It can help you recover all kinds of files including photos, audio, music, videos, emails archives, documents from various storage media like HDD, SSD, SD card, USB drive, digital camera, memory stick and so on.

Step 1. Get the hard drive recovery software MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Ultimate by clicking the following button. Install it on your computer and get it registered.

Step 2. After registration, you will get the main interface. Then launch Data Recovery on the top toolbar.

Step 3. Select the drive you want to recover data from and click Scan button on the lower right corner.

Here are three parts on the Data Recovery interface:

• Recovery Result:You will see the last scanning result record here and you can load recovery result by yourself to recover files directly.
• Logical Drive:All existing partitions on your computers will be listed here. If a partition does not have drive letters, it will be arranged at the end of the list.
• Hard Disk:All disks on your computer will be listed here, including external hard drive, SSD, USB drive, etc. You can also select a disk to scan directly.

Besides, if there are lost partitions or unallocated spaces on your hard drive, there will be Lost Partition or Unallocated Space parts.

Step 4. The data recovery software is scanning your drive now. You can click Pause or Stop button near the progress bar to pause or stop the scanning process if you find what you want. You can wait for the scanning to complete.

Step 5. Check needed files in the recovery result. You can preview a picture or .txt file which is smaller than 20MB. At last, click Save to save the recovered files.

Step 7. Choose a directory to save the needed files. It is recommended to save the recovered files on another drive. Otherwise, the lost/deleted data could be overwritten. Make sure you save files to a safe place.

During the repair process, if the hard drive you’re trying to fix contains important files, then you can also use the above data recovery tool to extract the documents, photos, music, videos, emails and other files from the hard drive easily.

Format Hard Drive

Now, you can format a hard drive that’s not working properly to fix the disk failure. Here are detailed steps to tell you how to format hard drive Windows 10 with the free disk utility.

Step 1. Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Ultimate and get the main interface.

Step 2. Select the drive and choose Format Partition from the left action panel.

Step 3. Then specify the partition label, file system as well as cluster size on this page. Then click OK to continue.

Step 4. Click Apply on the upper right corner to allow the pending operations.

After formatting, you can use your hard drive as normal.

Conclusion

Hard drive can become damaged or corrupted due to various hard drive errors like bad sectors on hard drive, file system corruptions. So you must learn these basic tips. After reading this article, you may find that hard drive repair is not so complicated.

If you have any question about how to make hard drive repair Windows 10 when there are hard drive errors, you can leave a message in the following comment zone and we will reply as soon as possible. If you have better solution, don't hesitate to share it with us. If you need any help when using MiniTool software, you may contact us via [email protected].

Hard Drive Repair FAQ

Summary :

External hard drives are widely used to store private and confidential businesses data. Besides, they are good choices for data backup. Since they are used so frequently, problems ensue; a lot of people desire to acquire external hard drive recovery software free. Here, I’ll introduce one and tell you how to recover data from external hard drive.

WD External Hard Drive Data Recovery

Western Digital hard drive is one of the most popular drives among users due to its performance. But it’s disappointing that many problems could be detected on a WD hard drive: WD external hard drive not working, WD passport not recognized Windows 10, etc. Therefore, how to fix the problem and finish WD external hard drive data recovery become the concerns of people.

MiniTool Solution is so considerate that it provides one-stop service for disk configuration, data backup & file recovery.

Why External Hard Drive Is Used Widely

There are 3 main reasons why you need an external hard drive.

• Convenience: undeniably, the external hard drives are using by more and more people mainly due to its convenience.
• Capacity: the external hard drive is a better choice than removable flash drive mainly because of its capacity; it allows you to carry terabytes of data wherever you go. In this way, you can get access to them any time you want.
• Data transfer: an easy and quick way to share files among different devices is using an external hard drive. Saving & transferring files using an external hard drive is safer and more economical than using the Cloud.

Here’s A True Example

Hi, I have one 3 TB WD my book external hard drive it gets unallocated. I can't access in windows but in the disk management, I can see it. It shows as unallocated. Please guide me to recover the data from this state of hard disk.”– by mafzal2000 at Tom’s Hardware

This message requiring help is posted by mafzal2000 on Tom’s Hardware forum. Obviously, his hard drive becomes unallocated now and he wants to find useful ways in short time to recover data from WD external hard drive.

Is that possible? Luckily, my answer is positive. I can promise you that WD hard drive data recovery in such a case is not a difficult task. I need to warn you two things:

1. Please don’t try to create new partitions & save new data onto that hard drive.
2. Please don’t choose any unreliable WD repair tool from the internet since it may bring additional damage to your data.

Attention please! For users who care about how to complete Seagate data recovery, they should read this page:

Maybe in the past, Seagate hard drive data recovery is a troublesome task for you. But, things are totally different now.

Taking those factors into consideration, I suggest users, experienced or not, get MiniTool Power Data Recovery for hard drive data recovery. It is 100% clean, and easy-to-use.

Possible Causes of Data Loss on External Hard Drive

MiniTool Power Data Recovery is useful for the following cases:

• You deleted important files from WD external hard drive by accident.
• You suddenly found useful files are not showing up in WD external hard drive.
• You connected WD external hard drive to a computer and found it shows as unknown.
• Your computer got attacked by virus/ransomware suddenly.

How to recover data from HDD shows as unknown:

On discovering your disk shows as unknown, uninitialized or unallocated, you must take actions at once to recover all valuable data from it.

In summary, your data could get lost from a WD external hard disk due to the following reasons:

• Unintentional file deletion or drive formatting (how to recover files from formatted hard drive?)
• Virus attack/invasion (how to recover files deleted by virus attack?)
• Corrupted file system (how to recover data from volume not contain a recognized file system?)
• Broken computer/system (how to recover files from the broken computer?)
• Damaged partition table (how to finish partition table recovery?)
• Unexpected power failure or surge
• Unknown reasons

No matter which is the reason that drives you to recover data from external hard drive, MiniTool can help! For people who need to finish Western Digital data recovery, MiniTool Power Data Recovery is definitely a good choice; you can download and install it immediately to another drive to be well prepared.

When the installation of this advanced disk recovery tool is finished, please launch it to restore data from external hard drive.

How to Use Western Digital Hard Drive Repair Software to Recover Data

After entering Power Data Recovery, you’ll first see 4 options, which are designed for different storage devices. Except for the CD/DVD Recovery, other modules can all be used to recover data when WD drive runs into problems: WD external hard drive stopped working, Western Digital hard drive not showing up, WD hard drive is clicking, etc.

Now, I will show you how to use those 3 options to complete data recovery from WD hard drive. Then, I’ll also introduce CD/DVD Recovery to you.

Option One – This PC

I advise you to choose This PC to regain important files/folders after you deleted them mistakenly (you can retrieve deleted files on PC). Besides, if you find the files located in a local partition/partition on external disk are lost, you should select this module.

How to recover (please connect WD external hard drive before recovery):

1. Select This PC from the main window.
2. Select the target partition on WD hard drive and click on the Scan button to detect deleted/lost files/folders.
3. Check all the needed files during or at the end of the scan and click on the Save button to set a new storage place for them.

Western Digital External Hard Drive Repair Tool

Option Two – Removable Disk Drive

Situation one: WD hard drive not showing up.

I found people are asking how to recover data from WD external hard disk which is not detecting. Actually, you should figure out whether the WD external hard drive is really not recognized by the computer. Sometimes, the WD external hard drive is only not showing up in Windows Explorer; when you open Windows Disk Management, you’ll see it.

Example:

Hi, My WD 1TB external hard drive has suddenly stopped working. On my laptop, TV & every other device it used to. It does not appear in the 'This PC' menu anymore yet it does show up in disc manager & device manager. I tried to map it but failed. However, when I tried to initialize it, I got 'Access Denied' even though I am the administrator. I've uninstalled, restarted, tried a different cable, deleted the Bus, and every other solution I have been able to Google. I have some very important files I do not want to lose.- said Primm on Tom’s Hardware

This post tells exactly how to fix WD passport external hard drive or other external hard drives of WD when they can’t be recognized:

The problem – external hard drive not showing up/recognized/detected – can be fixed easily by following ways.

Situation two: WD external hard drive light on but not working.

There are also many other people saying that their WD external hard drive not working or partitions are lost from the WD external hard drive. In this case, they can also use the recommended data recovery software to restore data from external hard drive.

Western Digital Drive Repair Utility

Example:

My WD external hard drive isn't working anymore? My cable has always been a problem (it's a little loose). Usually, it works fine, I just have to twitch or bend it a little and it'll work. However just now when I plugged it into my MacBook as usual, I get an error saying that disk utilities cannot fix the hard disk. I ejected it and tried to plug it in again. Now, the LED light lights up but the hard disk doesn't spin/start up. I searched my whole house and found some cables that fit the hard drive but still nothing works, the LED lights up but the hard drive doesn't start/spin. What could be the problem and how do I fix it? I have a lot of things inside the hard disk that I need. Also, does this help?- asked xshae on Tom’s Hardware

If your WD external hard drive is not working, you can try to recover data from it with MiniTool Power Data Recovery. As for how to recover files from the dead external hard drive, you should read this page carefully:

If you are stuck in finding ways to recover files from dead external hard drive efficiently, this passage will be very helpful.

If you’re one of the victims, you should select Removable Disk Drive or Hard Disk Drive to recover data (the former is also suitable for USB flash drive while the latter is only designed for the hard disk drive).

To recover data from lost partition on WD external hard drive, you should complete the following operations:

1. Click on Removable Disk Drive from the main interface.
2. Select the WD hard drive and click on the Scan button to detect partitions and files & folders in them.
3. Check all the files needing to be recovered from the scan result and recover them by pressing the Save button & setting a storage path.

Western Digital Hard Drive Repair Tool Kit

Please note that you can also select Removable Disk Drive when you find that some of your useful files are not showing in WD external hard drive suddenly, without damaging the using of the disk.

Option Three – Hard Disk Drive

If your WD external hard drive is formatted as a large partition, you may need to turn to Hard Disk Drive since the disk will be presented as a whole.

The recovery process of selecting Hard Disk Drive to recover data is almost the same as that of using Removable Disk Drive. So please refer to the previous part to have a look.

Option Four – CD/DVD Drive

The CD/DVD Drive option is not suitable for recovering data from hard drive. However, it is still useful when people need to get back missing files from a CD/DVD.

This option is suitable when you need to recover multimedia files like photos, music tracks and videos from compact discs. You need to connect the CD/DVD to your computer and make sure it appears after clicking on the CD/DVD Drive. Then, you should double click on the CD/DVD to start to scan and detect files in it.

That’s all about Windows data recovery. If you care about hard drive recovery Mac, please use MiniTool Mac Data Recovery instead.

How to recover data from a failing hard drive on Mac:

Please don’t waste time; just get files off failing hard drive on Mac immediately since they may disappear at any time.

One Special Reason Why WD External Hard Drive Is Not Detecting

If you’re running a Windows XP and find that the WD external hard drive can’t be displayed in Windows Explorer, you should enter Disk Management to take a look. You may found it finally showing up here. However, it can’t be used straight away and you might lose access to all data in it, right?

At this time, please recover data from it at once by using the method I have introduced above. Then, you can try those steps to make it appear/detect on a computer:

Western Digital Drive Test Tool

1. Stay in Disk Management and right click on the disk partition.
2. Choose Change Drive Letter and Paths… from right-click menu.
3. Click on Add and assign a drive letter to it.
4. Press OK to confirm.

Now, you can recreate partitions on it and then go to check whether it can be displayed in Windows Explorer (what if the system says Windows Explorer needs to be restarted?).

If this doesn’t help in your case, you can also choose to use MiniTool Partition Wizard to deal with GPT protective partition.

Last Words

Western Digital Hard Drive Repair Tool

Undeniably, the WD hard drive is used widely as an internal hard drive or external hard drive. Most people choose to save large amounts of important data on the external WD hard disk; in this way, they can take the data with them everywhere they go and access data conveniently. It’s indeed a good idea to store backup copies or transfer data among different devices by using external WD hard drive.

Western Digital Hard Drive Utilities

However, accidents are unpredictable. Your files could get lost due to a lot of reasons: accidental deletion/formatting, virus attack, system crash, and so on. When that really happens, you should get the recommended software and follow the tutorials given in above content to complete WD external hard drive data recovery easily and quickly.