Cracked / damaged USB connection
The Situation and Symptoms
It’s quite common for us to see external hard drives and flash drives that have damaged USB ports. Sometimes this happens from too much pressure or bad angle of connection. Sometimes it’s because the drive has been dropped and the connection broke or was damaged in the impact. Also, we’ve recovered hundreds of USB thumb drives over the years that were bent or cracked when a laptop was dropped or bumped that had the USB flash drive sticking out.
The Good News
Sometimes, if it’s just the connection that’s bad, and this is often an easy recovery for us. The data on the platters of hard drives or in the flash chips for SSDs and Flash Drives may still be in perfect condition… and we just need to work around the damaged connection.
The Solution
The safest route to recovery will always be to let the pros at IT Data Recovery handle the situation, but with some external drives, you may be able to detach the SATA-to-USB bridge and use a direct SATA connection or another similar SATA-to-USB bridge. However, if you try this and the drive doesn’t work immediately and pop up right away like it always used to, please don’t try making further attempts, and certainly do NOT choose to initialize the drive. There are many potential other things than may prevent this simple attempt from working, but the recovery may still be simple for us, as long as no changes have been made to the data yet.