Recovery of Data from a damaged WD 500GB SATA3 HDD A few days ago I was getting that HDD from an employee of a customer for to try to recover some of the (lost) data from that HDD. Unfortunate, that lady didn't have done any Backup of Data for more than 4 months. Ok, I took over that Job and started the check first to find out what would be the best way to go under the request NOT to do any altering physically to that drive. I was first trying to get the HDD recognized by the Computers BIOS, which failed on all Intel Machines I have, just the AMD Machine was get it accessed by BIOS. A Drive-Letter was shown, just access to the drive was rejected. Same happened while using it connected internally, as well as via eSATA and USB 2 and USB3 externally. Next step was to see was Tool App I could use if any? I started with Active@ File Recovery Enterprise 8.2: couldn't find that HDD! Next was Active@ Partition Recovery 5.3: same, drive not found! Same happened with EasyRecovery Pro 6.04! Also, OO DiskRecovery 3 didn't do the job! In the end, it was Easeus Data Recovery Wizard Pro 5.8.5 Which found the drive and also was access that HDD. The scanning for recoverable Data was started, very slow and has need 27h for to complete, just that scanning! More than 4Million Files was found on that HDD and I needed to get look up and select all those relevant Data Files for the last 120days, which neede more than 8h! The recovery of those Data was done in 21h! A total of 290679 files with a total Data size of 786.18GB was recovered! Many of those files were saved in 2 folder: 1 NTFS and 2 NTFS! with a different size of total Data (difference: 197MB). Normally, the scanning of a 500GB HDD SATA3 is done within 3h-4h at max, and the Data Recovery for found files, depending on amount and size will be done within 1h-6h. According to Drevitalize 3, the and HX-Info, the drive speed and spinning are normally. Bad Sectors wasn't shown, just the sectors/clusters couldn't be accessed within a given timeframe. Because I didn't know, which one are the correct needed by that Lady, I had to save both of them on a 1TB HDD. I was trying to first normal format that damaged HDD after the recovery was done: that didn't work. I also try to do a Low-Level Format: not work either, LLFMT couldn't lock the drive for to start the Low-Level Format. Most of the time I used Active@ File Recovery and it always was working, just with this drive, it was the first time it didn't! Same was for those other apps. I also tried some other Recovery Tools, NONE of them was working! Only the Easeus Data Recovery Wizard was able to access that HDD and do the Job. If someone else will have similar problems with Data Recovery from damaged HDD's, Try different Recovery Apps, one of them may work.