I have a 2TB Samsung NVMe drive, in a IcyBox USB adapter case. The drive is suddenly not available anymore… The PC sees the USB Storage unit, but disk manager can’t initialize the drive on it.
Any ideas?
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Basic troubleshooting would be
1- try it on a different machine
2- download one of those free software that allows to re-partition drives. Usually they do a better job than windows. (even though if Windows doesn’t recognize it, it could be a bad symptom)
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Sometimes even trying just a different USB port can help.
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I have tried what you guys suggest, apart from trying software… Any recovery software or other disc utilities that you can recommend?
It might not be what you need but my head keeps buzzing with the name Balena Etcher.
Let me Google if my brain is going crazy.
Edit : no that’s just to made images into discs…
I need to Google more.
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I have used a tool named “Disk Drill” before, on a SDcard that I could not mount anymore. Windows didn’t even recognize it anymore, but I could save almost all data.
Might be worth a try.
Edit:
I think this is the download site:
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If you got the spare space, try to get an image of the whole disk, in an undestructive way.
If possible duplicate the image to store one version in a safe place, then work on a copy.
You could use Linux for basic tools like dd.
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Yeah, I’d also switch to linux for this (but then I am already a linux user). Set up a usb stick with a live image, then you don’t need to install it beforehand.
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Problem is that the drive isn’t recognized. The OS just see a USB Storage Device, but no drive or drive letter, so how do I make an image of that?
Follow these instructions up to and including “Boot Linux Mint”, then open the Disks or partition program (press Windows then type “disk”) and check if you can make an image from there and put it on some external drive.
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
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That is not a problem if you want to copy all of it bit for bit. That’s why i suggested dd, which is dead simply a 1:1 copy of the whole 2 TB. It’s not even trying to interpret the data. You can do that later on the copy.
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Even when Windows will not give the drive a drive letter the program you linked will make a copy of the broken drive?
Wheels
@wheelsup_cavu, @Poneybirds suggested to do this in Linux. Maybe it works differently there? I know absolutely nothing about Linux…
What do you guys think of taking the drive out of the USB external case adapter and mount in in a PC…?
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That makes two of us
Wheels
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Good idea. Rules out the mechanics of IcyBox. Check in the UEFI (BIOS) if it’s appearing.
Also, does any other device work on that USB port? Try a thumb drive.
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Yes.
Will try mounting the M2 in a PC
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Hope you have better success than me. When my 2TB SSD crashed it did not matter if I used it as an external drive or as an internal device Windows would not assign it a drive letter. The screwy part, to me anyway, is that when I look at the drive using the disk management tool it shows that there is still data on the drive but I just can not access it. 
Wheels
If there is no drive letter, that just means the partition scheme might be broken. Or the Filesystem.
That’s just metadata. If the data is fine, you can restore it.
Stop thinking in the upper layers of the software stack, like filesystems. Start thinking in the lower part, where this thing is just 2TB. Just a bucket, like a huge binary file. Copy that first. No deeper logic applied here at all.
Once you got that, you can apply recovery tools to the copy, with the risk of destruction.
If the bucket does not copy at all, or the operating system does not recognize there is one, then you’re pretty much out of luck. It means there is a hardware fault.
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Literally going to need the 1st grade version of what I just read. I have left the drive alone since I saw that there was likely data still recoverable on the original drive but my searches have never given me a way I understood or felt safe using and risking losing the data on the original drive permanently. Making a backup of the original drive and then making a backup from that backup to risk was what I was hoping I could achieve at some point.
Wheels
So here’s how I (a dabbler in this sort of stuff) would do it:
- get the drive into a windows PC
- definitely don’t run checkdisk or Windows repair again, we’re beyond what that can help now.
- run Disk Drill and try to do a complete recovery to a network drive or a large physical drive in the PC
This isn’t going to give you a bootable disk back. But Disk Drill will do its best to reconstitute the files out of the readable blocks on the device. It’ll also lock the device once you start the rescue so Windows won’t “accidentally” write over any of the “lost” data on the disk.
This works really well for drives that physically store the data in blocks on the device, like hard drives and USB sticks. No idea if it works on nvme, sorry!
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