Hard Drive Partition Size Shown But Data Not There

My 3TB WD MyBook external hard drive stopped working 8 days ago. I have recovered some files from my backups, but some important files are still on my external hard drive. While using data recovery tools, they showed me I have a 750GB external hard drive, which is the capacity of my second partition, but I cannot find anything of my second partition on it. What should I do?

It seems that you first used Windows 7 to partition and reformat your disk while it was within the enclosure. Then you experienced issues with it and got rid of it. You can see all the partition information after installing it on your PC, but you can't access your data. The problem you encounter is not that easy to solve by yourself, and this is due to the bridge firmware's 4KB LBA configuration in WD 3TB MyBook external hard drive. The disk's native 512-byte LBAs are made visible when you remove the drive and connect it directly to the SATA connector on your computer motherboard. This implies that while the partition table will still be visible in sector 0, the actual partition data will be at the incorrect location.

The drive has to be put back into the enclosure. By the way, it looks like your model is an Elements. The data would have been encrypted, and you would have seen nonsense if it had been an Essentials. You'd better find an expert to help you fix this problem manually.

You can try some recovery tools to restore data from external hard drive. It is been so long since encountering the external hard drive issue the data is not that easy to be recovered. You can try EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard to scan the whole WD MyBook external hard drive. You can click "Lost Partitions" to scan and check the data on your lost partitions, and you can also download a partition recovery tool to recover the two lost partitions.