cgsecurity.org

fat12? that's for floppy disks. are the drives formatted properly?

I know sometimes things can hang on boot because they look for floppy drives that aren't there.

update:

by some miracle the drive was recognized by windows when I plugged it into the USB. Still couldn't do a chkdsk as the disk was set to read only.

Ran photorec and it seems to have recovered some part of the drive. I have at least some of the files back.

Still looking for solutions on how ...

I'm optimistic that it's not a physical problem because there's no unusual sounds coming from the disk and the computer can still detect it's a passport so there's something on there. Even TestDisk can see there's 931/1000 in usage. I'll try photorec.

i'm not as familiar with ddrescue but look into ...

Background

Took my ntfs WD My Passport to a friend's place, it wouldn't be recognized even though it was recognized less than an hour ago on my computer. Friend plugged/unplugged w/o ejecting while it was looking for drivers or something. We were not writing/copying data at the time. I run W10 ...