External Hard drives, being the secondly storage devices that they are, are extremely easy to erase in various ways. Here I tell you ways to deal with recovering deleted or formatted files on a portable hard drive.
Killed a external hard drive without making a backup for your data? Deleted your family pictures of years? A 1TB portable hard drive that suddenly changes to 0.0GB, or 32MB in size? Don’t panic, you are probably able to recover all your lost files with the help of this tutorial for external hard drive data recovery.
If you’ve been computer users for a decent amount of time, someone might have told you that data stored on a external hard drive is not exactly safe. I’m here to assure you that it is indeed true.
When a file is deleted from a portable hard drive, the file system of this disk simply mark the file as deleted. The data is not actually removed from the drive, but rather the space it takes up on the disk is now considered to be free for use. Therefore, if you delete files accidentally, you have an excellent chance of being able to restore it only if you do not write more new data to the disk. But to make it, you need the help with a data recovery tool.

What to do? Well here are a few easy step to recover data from external hard drive by using a third party data recovery software.
After data loss, please stop using the portable hard drive any more, and immediately download Tenroshare Data Recovery Professional (You can get it from http://www.any-data-recovery.com/external-hard-drive-recovery.htm) and then install it on a drive other than the one on which your files were lost.
Step 1. Start the data recovery software and choose the right recovery module for external hard drive data recovery. “Delete Recovery” is the one that can help you recover deleted files on the external hard drive. “Format Recovery” is able to get all your data back from a formatted hard drive. “Partition Recovery” can retrieve your partitions after you deleted a partition or formatted a partition. For “Raw Recovery”, you can select a file type to recover, like Photos, Videos, Music or Documents. Here I take “Delete Recovery” for example.
Step 2. Choose the dirve letter for your external hard drive to “Start Scan”. You can even use the preview feature to display the file that you are trying to get back.
Step 3. Simply click “Recover” to move on.
Step 4. Select a path to “Save” all your recovered data. Do not save back to the external hard drive or the desktop (you won’t like more than hundred of files to cover your desktop). All done with external hard drive recovery.
This external hard drive recovery solution is strictly for resolving software issues with your data on the hard drive, like accidentally deleting partitions or files, formatting the disk. If your hard drive has a physical problem, if it is making strange noises or not detected by computer, nothing will work and nothing you can do. Turn off your computer, unplug the drive to bring it to a data recovery service if your files are vital.

When you meet with “the dead hard disk” situation, first you can check it by removing the possible “dead hard disk” and install it into another healthy computer as a secondary drive, if it can be detected by the healthy computer, then indicating the hard disk is “okay”. In this case, it’s easy to get your data stored on hard disk. You can just copy all the data when you install the possible “dead hard disk” into another computer.