External Hard Drive Help Needed??

[USAFVET98]

Whats up IAP? Ok, I got an external hard drive for Christmas and it was working great until about a week and a half ago. I used it twice and have all of my pictures on it mostly of my son since the day he was born. I was getting ready to back it up on my other external hd and it just kept making the noise and the computer never recognized it..

I called tech support and talked with them for a while and we determined that the hd has failed. They will replace the unit but I need my data off of it first.. I cant afford to lose these pictures. The tech support guy said it sounds like the board fried so I should be able to recover the data, my problem is, I dont know how to recover it!! Help? Anyone??

Here is the unit I have-
http://www.simpletech.com/products/storage/simpledrive

Thanks in Advance

 

[alphageek]

Ouch... I will tell you and all that as an IT guy I cannot stress enough that anything really important has to be on 2 different media. Hard drives fail, the fail often and fail at weird times... My rule of thumb used to be " less than 3 months or more than 3 years". Because there is flaws that will cause failures early. My latest word laptops hard drive failed after less than 2 months.

Now recovery of your data can range from cheap to expensive.
If its the enclosure that failed you could pull the drive out and put it in another. That's unlikely but a chance... You could let it sit for a couple days and try again, sometimes unplugging helps... There is a "freezer" trick which will sometimes get things moving again for a time.... Above that there is swapping parts from an identical drive or professional recovery, both cost a scary amount or need some significant technical experience.

Sorry Brian, but this isn't a magic "do this" type problem.

 

[jskeen]

Well, like He said, if you get lucky you could open the enclosure, take out the hdd, and hook it up either as an internal drive or using an external usb cable and separate power brick, and pull your data to another drive. If that don't do it, you could try taking it to a local pc repair shop, some of them can do simple repairs on the hdd itself, but your only really high probability fix is to send it off and have a professional company open the drive in a clean room and transfer the platters to a recovery jig and extract the data.

 

[srf1114]

You need to understand the nature of the external drive. All it really is, is a regular hard drive in an additional case. The case provides a power supply and an interface connecter board that links that regular drive to the computer.
This interface connector board "translates" the hard drives SATA ( or what ever interface is on the drive) interface into the USB 2 interface you use to plug into the computer.
If the case provided interface board is bad, you can remove the hard drive from the case, and plug it into a free spot on your PC. In essence you just made it an internal hard drive.
If that works, and you still want it to be an external hard drive, you can buy a new external case( case only, no drive, cost about $40) and put the drive back into it. Bingo you back to working just fine.
If making it an internal Hard drive doesn't resolve the issue, the the actual Hard drive it self is the problem. Still going with the failed board idea, you can replace the circuit board that is actually a part of the hard drive. With one from the exact same model of hard drive. Finding this can be tricky, since drives change all the time. Even as an IT specialist it isn't something I do lightly. First of it voids any warranty.

There are Data recovery companies that can even move the actual platters out of a failed drive into a new drive to recover data. These companies are good, but very expensive. Some times to the tune of $100 a megabyte ( average picture can be 3-6 megabytes in size).

If we move into the more likely realm that there is a format error on the disk, and not a failed controller board I propose the following: Does the hard drive still spin? If yes, does it make any clicking sounds when it spins? If no, do you know anyone with a Mac? If so plug the external drive in to the Mac and see if the drive mounts.
The Mac may mount the drive, even when a PC doesn't (it has to do with how the PC and Mac differs on what they read first on the disk) if the Master Boot Record is bad, a PC will not mount it, but a Mac which doesn't need the MBR, may still do so.

VERY IMPORTANT if the Mac says the drive is unreadable, DO NOT LET IT FOMRAT the drive. But your in luck because that means the Mac can read the drive, and you can get "un-erase" utilities that let you scan the drive for usable data and restore it. I use Disk Rescue 3 to retrieve data from PC hard drives on my Mac a lot. It not free software, but is worth the $70 or so it cost.

Guess I probably didn't answer any questions, but hopefully gave you some options.

 

[toddlajoie]

OK, everyone has scared the heck out of you, and rightly so, as everything I've heard from others here is spot on accurate. My comments here will give you some hope, in that I've had at one time or another probably close 20 of these external drives, and probably at least 10 different models. I've also, like you, had several of them fail in one form or another at some time. I have been lucky in that I have never lost data, mostly because it is more often than not in these things, the case that is the problem, as the drives are far more reliable than the case, power supply, and interface. I've pulled the drives out, mounted them in an internal bay of a PC, and transferred all the files off of them to another drive, and in several situations, mounted the drive in another external box and went on to use it for several more years (but you never forget your first crash, and learn not to trust these little boxes...)

You can pick up one of these little things pretty cheap ($20-40) which can make it dirt simple to connect a bare raw drive to the USB port of any computer and have it show up (plus it's cool to have this tangle of wires and bare parts sitting on the floor with your laptop) Just be sure you get one that works with your drive. My suggestion is to get the one that does both IDE/PATA (the old standard PC hard drives) and Serial ATA (the new standard...) drives and 2.5" laptop drives, as it's not that much more $$ in the end, and it will do almost any drive you likely have (I REALLY doubt you have a SCSI drive and don't know it...) The only potential monkey wrench is if you happen to have one of the "Security" models that have encryption built into the interface. If the drive is depending on the interface of the case to provide security access, you may find that the drive will work plugged into this thing, but you can't access any of the drive... The price of security...

Best of luck!!!