Recover Data from Hard Disk Showing Empty

"I have a Western Digital, 1TB SATA hard drive. It’s an external hard drive, and when connected to computer, it says that it is empty. It does show up on Disk Management. When I click on properties it shows almost 100% free space that can’t be true. There are 100’s of photos of my family, and other useful documents on that hard drive which I desperately want.

Not being too knowledgeable about such things, I just don’t have the expertise to know what can be done to recover data from hard disk showing empty. Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated!”

Well the reason for the hard drive to show as empty even though the files are present on it, may be due to virus infection! Malwares will set certain file attributes to hide your files located on hard drive. The files may be affected with the hidden attribute.

How to recover files not showing up in hard disk by removing hidden attributes?

The easiest way to restore files from hard drive displaying as empty is to remove the hidden attribute from all files in the system. To do this, follow these instructions…

• Open the command prompt (Start->Programs->Accessories->Command Prompt, right click, "Run as Administrator"). If you don't have UAC enabled, just run a regular command as an administrator user
• Type attrib –H –R –S C:\* /S /D. You can replace C:\* with the drive letter you want to fix. Here –H unsets the Hidden attribute; -R unsets the Read-only attribute; -S unsets the System attribute. /S makes it recursive, /D makes it apply to folders as well

Even after applying the above command if still files present on the hard drive is missing, then there might be chances of hard drive corruption due to virus infection, file system damage, or improper handling of disk, etc. So under such cases, recovering data from hard disk showing as empty will be quite difficult. Wondering how can I retrieve files from hard drive that shows as empty? Don’t worry; if you make use of reliable recovery tool then the problem can be easily resolved!

Which tool to go with to recover data from hard disk showing empty?

Hi5 Partition Recovery Software is the right choice to recover data from hard disk showing as empty when none of the methods goes well. This application has been designed by the industrial experts. It has the ability to recover files such as audio files, video files, images, raw pictures, documents, zip files, spreadsheets, and so on. The program resolves the hard drive showing as empty issue by retrieving data from corrupted hard drive easily. In addition, it also recovers files from deleted, lost, formatted or reformatted hard drive partitions.

Know more about Hi5 Partition Recovery Application

OS compatibility and support for other storage devices: Hi5 Partition Recovery Toolkit supports all common Windows operating systems such as Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, 2008, and 2012, and various kinds of storage devices like external hard drives, flash drives, memory cards, iPods, and so on.

User friendly functions: Hi5 Software Partition Recovery Wizard is equipped with two different data recovery modules which will be able to recover lost data in different situations. “Partition Recovery” will be used to retrieve data from hard drive showing as empty (corrupted), deleted and lost partitions. Whereas “Formatted / Reformatted Recovery” will be helpful in recovering data after formatting the drives or partitions accidentally, and even to find lost data after reformatting of the drives.

Apart from this, the software consists of “Save Recovery Session” option, which will be helpful to pause the recovery session in the middle and again resume the process from where it stopped. Meaning it helps to avoid rescanning of the drive.

Simple instructions to recover data from hard drive showing as empty: The recovery steps could be accomplished just by few mouse clicks. There will be detailed information in each and every step. Let us see the steps required to get back data from hard drive showing as empty…

• Download and install the software on a healthy computer
• Attach the victim drive to that system
• Run the application
• Since you want to recover data from drive displaying as empty, select “Partition Recovery”
• Then specify the drive from where you want to restore data
• Next choose the file type you want to get back. If you want to restore the entire partition, simply click on “Next”
• The program rigorously scans the specified drive and gets back all the data which will be displayed in data view and file type view
• Finally select the files you want to restore back, preview them, and store them in a location of your choice

And that's all, you're Done!! Now you can see and use all your files with ease

What’s more, Hi5 Partition Recovery Program will also aids in finding data from storage devices having bad sectors by creating a replica of the data present in the hard disk by skipping the bad sectors which won't affect the data. It also supports all popular versions of FAT and NTFS file system. You can utilize the demo version of this application and see the recovery results before you purchase the full version.

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