Recover Lost Data from Toshiba External Hard Drive

Written By Jyoti Prakash
Approved By Rohit Arora
Updated on 16 Mar, 2023
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Today, the most reliable hard drives are manufactured by trusted vendors like Western Digital (WD), Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung and Toshiba. Toshiba external hard drives are widely used for backing up data, and they are often the preferred choice of users as computer hard drives since they are good at rebuilding multiple external partitions to better manage files.

You might have or might be using a Toshiba hard drive as an external drive or maybe within a Toshiba laptop. However, these hard drives are also prone to problems like inaccessibility or total loss of data stored on them. This article will be covering the reasons behind the loss of crucial data on Toshiba hard drives, their common fixes and recommended data recovery solutions.

Reasons for loss of data on Toshiba hard drive

External or internal hard drives though look sturdy in appearance, are often delicate pieces of technical excellence. Occurrences which seem minor like power outages or rough handling can often lead to permanent hard drive damage.

Here are some of the most common data loss reasons on Toshiba hard drives:

Uneven power surges or voltage fluctuations while the drive is being used.
Sudden system shutdown.
Improperly disconnecting the drive from the system if it is an external one.
Accidental deletion of important data (often resulting from a Select All + Shift + Delete operation).
Unplanned formatting of the hard drive.
Virus / Malware attack.
Damage or deletion of the hard drive’s structures.
Improper handling or dropping of the hard drive.

Any of the above mentioned reasons has the capability to render the hard drive permanently useless. Hence, your data should always be backed up and you should take proper steps to ensure the hard drive’s smooth operation like installing reliable anti-virus, handling the drive properly, connecting and disconnecting it properly etc.

Common fixes you can try out

Here are a few common fixes you could try out before you start panicking and consider rushing to the experts. Often, fixes like these actually work:

1. If your laptop or computer is not booting at all, remove the drive and connect it to another computer. If it boots, but you can’t access your data, all you might need is a good data recovery service. However, if the other computer also does not boot and you hear a faint clicking sound, the drive might have suffered physical damage and might need professional help.

2. In a case of physical damage too, there is something you can do. If you’ve done it before, take the drive apart. You could find the reason behind the fault such as a bad interface board or faulty PCB. If it is indeed a faulty PCB, you can get a now one from the Internet based on a comprehensive search according to the model number of your drive. However, attempt opening the drive only if you have knowledge about it or else you might worsen the damage.

3. If you can access the hard drive but cannot access your data, owing to accidental deletion or formatting, probably the best thing you could do is stop writing any new data to the hard drive. This is because even after deletion, your data is not erased from the system; you just loose access to it. The space occupied by deleted files is marked as “available to reuse”, so the deleted files remain physically intact on the drive until they are overwritten by other files. Hence not writing new data could guarantee a better chance of data recovery.

4. You could use the Recovery CD or DVD included with most Toshiba notebook computer models to repair the hard drive.

5. Some Toshiba laptops include the Toshiba Hard Drive Recovery Utility, which is stored in a special partition on the hard disk drive, along with the system files. This utility can be used for the ‘recovery’ of the hard disk drive to its original factory state (in terms of contents).

Here are the steps to use the Toshiba HDD recovery utility on Toshiba notebook:

Restart the computer while holding down the 0 (zero) key.
You will see the utility’s screen listing down 3 options:

Restore original factory image (recommended).
Restore partition C: of HDD without changing current partition size (Advanced option).
Restore image to C: partition with user-specified size (Advanced option).

Thereafter, the process is a simple instruction follow procedure. The steps to repair hard disk through recovery CD / DVD are also the same.

Limitations of These Fixes

Though the fixes mentioned above often work wonders, sometimes, they fail to owe to the following limitations:

Taking the hard drive to service center professionals could prove to be quite expensive. This option should be undertaken only if the hard drive has suffered extensive physical damage.
Attempting some of the fixes requires technical expertise and field knowledge which many users don’t have.
Some users might not have the Toshiba HDD Recovery CD / DVD.
The Toshiba HDD Recovery Utility is available only on some notebook models.

Recommended Solution

Unless the hard drive is severely physically damaged, perhaps the best way to repair the drive would be to format it. Thereafter, to recover your data you should go for premium quality Toshiba hard drive recovery software.

We recommend using Stellar Data Recovery Professional software for this purpose. The software works impressively to accomplish the process of recovering lost, deleted, or inaccessible data on Windows based drives and removable media. You can rest assured of regaining access to your precious data in no time.

Final Words

So, the next time your Toshiba hard drive lands up in a problem, you know what to do and what to avoid. After the drive has been repaired, go for a good data recovery solution like Stellar Data Recovery Professional to securely reclaim all your inaccessible files.

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About The Author

Jyoti Prakash

Problem solver and Data recovery specialist. Usually share informative articles on data recovery, database corruption and ways to recover lost data.

56 comments

azie says:

November 2, 2016 at 12:54 pm

hi, i have a problem with external hard disk-Toshiba. My laptop cannot read it. i am very sure, my external hard disk did not suffer from physical damage because i always careful with it. i hope Toshiba could help me to retrieve all file. the noise came from hard disk make me wonder what happen with this hard disk. i have two external Toshiba hard disk. Unfortunately, both of it have a same problem. Please help me.

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  November 3, 2016 at 10:52 am
  
  Hi Azie,
  
  To understand the concept of the clicking noise of a hard drive, I suggest you to go through Read Moreto know more about it.
  
  For recovering your data, I advise you to run our Professional software as recommended in the above link and you can easily recover your data back.
  
  Kindly acknowledge the status.
  
  Reply
Jovy Ann Casamorin says:

September 19, 2016 at 1:40 am

My toshiba external drive says that the files were corrupted. But asper checking, the space availability is still the same. the files were not accessible but the folders were all there. I really wanted to recover all those important files..:(

Reply
Margaret S. Marble says:

September 9, 2016 at 5:24 am

Toshiba drive is corrupt and greyed out in Disk utility. Can’t afford to loose my files from this drive. I am running OS X El Capitan, kindly let me know how can I recover my hard drive?

Reply
1. Vishal says:
  
  September 9, 2016 at 7:09 am
  
  Hi Margaret,
  
  Thanks for writing to us!!
  
  Your Toshiba external hard drive sounds logically corrupt but don’t worry since you can still perform Mac data recovery through Stellar Mac Data Recovery tool. Here goes the download link. Use the application to scan, preview and recovery files from your inaccessible Toshiba external hard drive on OS X El Capitan. You may reach us at 877-778-6087 for technical assistant.
  
  Best Regards
  Vishal
  
  Reply
John Peter says:

August 8, 2016 at 6:30 am

Hi, my hard drive is not working fine. I have 3 partitions on my Toshiba hard drive and out of them 1 is Recovery image drive, other is local drive (c drive) and the one is data storing drive. Now the problem is that whenever I open my D drive which is data storing drive it shows nothing in it and appears blank. I believe the issue is with the hard drive, please help me.

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  August 8, 2016 at 8:13 am
  
  Hi John,
  
  If you think it is because of damaged hard drive, then I suggest you to use Checkdisk command to confirm the issue. Checkdisk command is the most helpful command to detect and troubleshoot the issue with the hard drive. If this doesn’t help you, then please feel free to ask me for further help.
  
  Reply
Jolenlily says:

July 29, 2016 at 8:19 am

A friend suggests me this article to recover my data from Toshiba external hard drive. Great information thanks for sharing it.

Reply
Dary Chia says:

June 20, 2016 at 9:47 am

My Toshiba hard drive is not showing any file into it, whereas it carries a number of important files stored in it. I don’t know why it happen, but want to recover my data from the drive. Is the solution you have recommended can successfully work on Toshiba external hard drive?

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  June 21, 2016 at 4:38 am
  
  Hello Dary,
  
  Yes, you can download the above-mentioned software to recover your data from Toshiba hard drive. This tool supports almost all hard drives of different companies.
  
  Reply
Damien says:

June 16, 2016 at 8:56 am

Hi editor,
Recently my MacBook Pro mid-2012 with Toshiba hard drive started doing some updates where it got stuck in midway. No progress had been started in the bar for nearly 3 hours nor did it respond any type of key commands. After that, I decided to fix it but disk utilities told me it wasn’t going to work anyway. Still getting the error messages and facing problems of data loss. By mistake, I don’t have any data backup available at present. Please tell me some suitable solution to get rid from this problem?

Reply
1. Vishal says:
  
  June 17, 2016 at 10:50 am
  
  Hey Damien, since your Toshiba Mac hard drive isn’t booting I recommend you to register Stellar Data Recovery for Mac with Recovery CD which will boot up your Mac and perform recovery of files from the Toshiba hard disk drive.
  
  Hope this resolves your issue.
  
  Reply
Lydia Jenkins - San Francisco says:

May 31, 2016 at 6:10 pm

HELP!!! Please. I too have a Toshiba drive and I replaced the cable. The drive was detectable for about two weeks on a MAC and a Dell. Now neither laptops can read the files on the drive. The indicator light no long blinks blue. I do not want to lose all of the files and folders on this drive. What do you recommend? I took it to Best Buy as this is where I purchased the Toshiba drive and the additional cable. They were no help. How can i get the data off of this drive or who should I take it to to “rebuild” this drive to extract the data? I don’t even care about the drive anymore. I just want all of the data on it.

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  June 1, 2016 at 7:17 am
  
  Hello Lydia Jenkins,
  
  First of all, I would suggest you to check your hard drive in disk management? If it is not appearing in disk management, then most likely, it is physically damaged and you need to take a help from an expert. If, it is visible in the disk management, then run check disk command to troubleshoot the issues with the hard drive. I
  believe after running chkdsk command, your drive will start detecting in windows and you can access your data. Good Luck!!
  
  Reply
Jayne says:

May 31, 2016 at 10:17 am

I have an issue with my Toshiba external hard drive. Suddenly it stopped recognizing in Windows explorer. I am using Windows 7; can you please tell me how I can make my hard drive accessible.

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  June 1, 2016 at 8:13 am
  
  Hello Jayne,
  
  To overcome from this issue, you can try the following fixes:
  
  Plugin the hard drive in another port.
  Check your hard drive by inserting it into the another system.
  Reassign drive letter to the hard drive by going into disk management.
  
  Hope these fixes works for you!!
  
  Kindly acknowledge.
  
  Reply
Elba says:

September 28, 2015 at 7:09 am

I’m using Toshiba external hard drive and facing problem to get it detected by the system. I’ve stored over 20 GBs of useful files that I don’t want to lose at any cost.
Is there any way to restore all of my data?

Reply
1. Abhay says:
  
  September 28, 2015 at 8:23 am
  
  I strongly suspect that USB cable or connective media has been damaged and you’ll need to replace that. On contradictory side, it may also be possible that the hard drive suffers physical damages and can’t survive any longer.
  
  Try connect the drive to another computer or USB ports or after changing the USB/SATA adapter and see if the system can detects it.
  
  Feel free to share your progress!!
  
  Reply
2. Ted N. says:
  
  February 3, 2018 at 11:51 pm
  
  Hi: I deleted 300+ GB of pictures (jpg) from my Toshiba portable external hard drive but not seeing any of the free space. The pie chart still shows the drive almost full. I have accessed the drive and unchecked hidden folders , etc. and have emptied the recycle bin on the external drive as well as om my laptop but can’t seem to find a way to see , what should be, almost 400 or 500GB of the newly emptied space. Ihope you can help!
  
  Reply
  1. Jyoti Prakash says:
    
    February 15, 2018 at 3:54 am
    
    Hello Ted,
    
    Thank you for contacting Stellar Data Recovery.
    
    We would like to inform that issue which you are facing is related to the system or the drive. You may try to reconnect the drive to another system then check the results.
    
    We have Stellar Windows Data Recovery software to recover the lost or deleted data. In case, you wish to recover the lost files then we recommend you to try the demo version from the below mentioned link and check the possibility of recovery:
    
    Download Link
    
    Please get back to us for any further query.