Lost Data on Samsung M3 1TB

[R Montenegro]

Good morning folks. I'm new to the forum, and this is my first post. I've tried everything within my own limited knowledge abut data recovery to recover data from my Samsung M3 1TB hard drive.

Here is the deal. Two years ago paranoia led me to attempt "hiding" some of the folders on the drive by putting a password on them. In trying to access the drive afterwards, I encountered a situation where it was saying that the drive needed to be formatted. Foolishly, I did a partial format. The drive is now reading as "empty". I put the drive in a drawer and left it there as I did not have the time to try to recover the files. NOW, two years on, I need to find some important work files that are stored on the hard drive. I tried EVERYTHING within my own (very limited) knowledge. From partition recovery software to testdisk and photorec. Obviously nothing worked. Only files with strange names and extensions. I would prefer not taking the drive to a recovery center. Hoping that some knowledgeable person here could assist me. If not, I guess I have to just count my losses.

Thanks in advance.

 

[pclab]

You should try with more professional recovery software like UFS Explorer, Rstudio or Reclaime.
You also need to check the health of the drive, check for bad sectors for instance.
If data continues to be corrupted, that could be because of data was overwritten or too many bad sectors for instance.

 

[R Montenegro]

Thank you, will try Reclaime and UFS Explorer. R-Studio was tried unsuccessfully.. I never wrote to the disk, so I don't believe the data was overwritten. Will let you know how it goes...