Barracuda 7200.11 1 5TB Hard drive is recognized as 0MB

[aMADeO!]

Here is the issue I am facing. I have client who send me his 5TB hard disk. It is a Barracuda 7200.11 1 drive which he purchased some months ago. He had configured automatic backup on this drive. The drive was purchased from a local dealer. It was working fine when suddenly one day the system crash with blue screen. Now the drive is not detected at all. It showed up sata failure error on startup. I had checked the drive in my system which shows the same error. It is not recognized by bios. But when I open disk management it says that the disk can be initialized. Now I cannot format the drive because there is data inside it. What can be done to get the data back from it. I had tried some hard drive recovery tool which also detects the drive as 0mb. How can it shows this amount. There is around 3TB or more data inside it which is needed to be recovered on priority. I fear using hard drive recovery tools, as they might not format it completely. What should I do now.

[Chahel]

That is really very tough condition. First of all it is necessary that the drive must be detected in bios atleast with the full size. Many bios face issue in detecting a drive above 1TB. This is the limitation of bios. So what you can do is try a recover program. You will need to try some of the tool unless anyone of it shows you miracle. Or the best thing you can do is spend some money and contact data recovery series. They will charge certain amount and will recover data. There is no guarantee for the same but it has worked in my case many times.

[Lisa Boney]

That shows the hard drive is facing some issue with connectivity. Does your motherboard meets the standard to read a 5Tb drive. If not then there is one simply way that you can try before going for any paid recovery service. Try to arrange a hard drive enclosure. A enclosure that supports usb interface with sata connectivity. Fix the drive inside and connect it your system. There is no need to check the drive in bios. The hard disk will be detected as plug and play external storage device. Now see that you are able to access the data or not. You can simply copy paste everything out of it. And if still it is not detected then this is a hardware failure.

[Naq]

There are many things that can be tried it. From updating firmware to flashing bios. A 5Tb drive needs special steps for installation and they work smoothy on 64bit hardware.

[Roey]

If you have a mac system then this might be much easier. Mac system does not face any issue related to hardware limitation. I had recovered my 3TB hard drive on a mac system by mounting the disc on it.