In my case it was a WD, My Passport Ultra, 1TB. You are a life saver of a life time of pictures and other documents. After searching and reading through many other sites I got lucky to come across yours. The other sites mostly offered information that it was either lengthily or in confusing IT lingo, or advised on downloading suspicious software. I followed this easy steps to check my external memory on Drive-J and after approx. 7 hours BINGO! it was all back. Now to find a way to safely backup all my data. Once again, THANK YOU…

Sorry autocorect! *USB

Ok mine is now going through the process. I have only had my hard drive 2-3 weeks and then fell asleep with it on last night and must have pulled the use out. Not sure if it was from this that it’s crashed or something else, bot sure whether to return it under warranty or not? 😕

@ Nick:

Hi Nick,

Same problem with 1TB dell HD ..3rd day in progress is showing 11 percent complete..Please let me know how long it took for your hd to complete the process.

Thanks for the tip. I am currently running the command trying to retrieve my info which I cannot access. Its been 3 days now that it is running non stop. Since over two days it has been stuck at 36%. Does someone know how long it might take?
I have a 1TB portable toshiba hdd with about 300 mb of data in it.
Any advice will be well appreciated.

Thanks

I’m currently using chkdsk on my LG 1TB external hard drive. It’s going well so far and I’m hoping all works well by the end of it!!

Thank you!!

Please help

C:\Windows\system32>CHKDSK /F /R /X G:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted.

I tried running the CMD command as said by you but got an error stating unable to determine the volume and the state.

I tired using recover software but it says “the drive needs to be formatted before use, do you want to format it now”

Please help as my entire study material is in the drive.

Thanks & Regards,

Faizan M.

Thank you very much for your advice. My drive could not be recognised except through the Computer Management tag after I knocked it on the table as I stood up with my laptop and I could not open any of my files because I got the error message above. I used your recommendations and my files (400gb) are now accessible and copying over to another external drive as I type. Luckily all of the important ones – irreplaceable family photos were backed up on another external. I can also run chkdsk using the properties tag now. I had been prepared to chalk it up as one of those things after reading that I might be able to get my files back if I send the drive away and pay hundreds of pounds for data recovery. Thank you very much again.

It worked! Thanks for the detailed instructions. I was able to recover 99.9%; 140GB of photos, video and data. It took 96 hours but I was patient. It was stuck on 11% but kept working away and my files are now safe and backed up.