My external hard drive stopped working - any ideas?

whirlpool

I bought an external hard drive about three years ago. It's worked fine always but the fan in it was very noisy. I never have it on for longer than five minutes at a time, and I only have it on at most once a day, so there was never any risk of over heating. So after three years I made the decision to remove the casing and disconnect the fan. The hard drive continued to function correctly.

After about a total of one hour's use (spread over a few days), the hard-drive ceased being recognized by any computer. This is what it's been doing:

1) Powers-up. Red light comes on. After a while, light turns purple and I can hear the hard-drive switch off.

2) The laptop is not being shown by my operating system. However, when I disconnect the USB from the computer, the computer makes the "busy" noise for a few seconds, so obviously it knows something has happened.

I occasionally felt the hard-drive to feel the heat, and it never appeared to be particularly hot.

So I just can't get into it at all now.

The hard-drive is Western Digital.

Any ideas? Other than send it to a repairs shop.

infoTurtle

Suppose the first thing to do is find out if its the hard drive that's broke or the converter (that converts the drive from internal to external) so take it apart and plug it into your pc, if it runs fine, its your converter, if not its your drive. If its your drive its still not beyond repair, just need to know what exactly is wrong here

whirlpool

infoTurtle wrote: »

Suppose the first thing to do is find out if its the hard drive that's broke or the converter (that converts the drive from internal to external) so take it apart and plug it into your pc, if it runs fine, its your converter, if not its your drive. If its your drive its still not beyond repair, just need to know what exactly is wrong here

Thanks for responding.

I'm not sure what you mean, though. Which part of the external hard drive is a converter? Why does it need a converter?

"so take it apart and plug it into your pc"

Take what apart? Plug what into my pc? And how?

Lol. Excuse my ignorance.

spannerotoole

Get a different external unit, plug the actual drive into the new unit and plug it in. If this seems beyond you, please send me a message and we can discuss business.

akamossie

it seems that its recognised by the PC if hear the noises, but maybe of the overheating could cause trouble, or even might be partition corruptd, check in the device managener and computer management if the hard drive is showing or not.

spannerotoole

akamossie wrote: »

it seems that its recognised by the PC if hear the noises, but maybe of the overheating could cause trouble, or even might be partition corruptd, check in the device managener and computer management if the hard drive is showing or not.

Just because it's making noises doesn't mean it is being recognised by the pc, your, It's probably not a corrupt partition, as a corrupt partition would fail to mount the device at all, What if the problem is with the usb drivers? Checking device manager and computer management would fail to diagnose the issue.

What if he's not using windows, Say for example he's using Linux?
What then.

What if he's using a starter edition of windows where these kind of diagnostics are limited?

What if, god help us, he's a mac user?

It's most likely the sata/ata controller in the external drive

akamossie

i am afraid you are wrong, even if corrupted it will mount the drive but not in "My Computer" it will appeard in the disk management as unallocated or RAW.

Although i agree with for usb drivers, which highly possible then in that case try in a different PC.

If you have Linux or MAC then try on windows simple as

infoTurtle

whirlpool wrote: »

Thanks for responding.

I'm not sure what you mean, though. Which part of the external hard drive is a converter? Why does it need a converter?

"so take it apart and plug it into your pc"

Take what apart? Plug what into my pc? And how?

Lol. Excuse my ignorance.

Sorry, is my fault for not being clear. Inside an external hard drive, is a regular hard drive, as you would have in your PC. The converter will convert you hard drive from internal to external. The converter is also so you can plug in a usb cable to connect it to any pc. What I mean by take it apart is, unscrew the case of the external, open it up and take out the sweet berry inside that is an internal drive. This is easily connected to your PC to check if the hard drive responds. The connection and simple and standard.
From the way your talking (and I mean this with no disrespect) it seems you haven't played around with the insides of your PC and may not have the connections. They're cheap to buy or if you know anyone that does PC modifaction, you might be able to borrow either the SATA or IDE cable (there only two types for desktop).

Should the hard drive respond,, its just the part in the case that are broken, should it not, we're going to have to do some hard drive repair

spannerotoole

akamossie wrote: »

i am afraid you are wrong, even if corrupted it will mount the drive but not in "My Computer" it will appeard in the disk management as unallocated or RAW.

Although i agree with for usb drivers, which highly possible then in that case try in a different PC.

If you have Linux or MAC then try on windows simple as

Actually it's not that simple, say he's using Linux and he wanted to use a filesystem that is superior to NTFS (not difficult) like ext3 or btrFS Windows will not recognise the drive at all, or will say it needs to be formatted. I'm sure he has data on there that he would like to keep.

So using a Redmond based OS will not work in this example.

MichealKenny

my advice is for the future, get a RAID 1 setup going, two or more hard drives that are duplicates of each other so you will never lose data if one fails, plus HDD's are mighty cheap nowadays and I'm guessing cause you got the hard drive 3 years ago, its around 250GB - 500GB so you could get 2 500GB drives for €80 and just put them in RAID 1, of course then you would need a desktop pc or NAS box to store them, hope this helps for the future

whirlpool

Thanks for all the responses so far! Appreciated! I'm still quite in the dark, to be honest. I have taken all the screws out that I could see. I've taken photos of the parts I'm left with and attached below - five photos with this post and two photos with the post following this one. It'd be great if anyone could take a look and let me know what I should do with which parts etc...

P.S. I do not know what SATA, RAID or IDE are.

whirlpool

...

spannerotoole

You have an IDE drive.

This is what you need it costs 20 euro from peats of parnell street. Just plug the drive into the connector and the power bit in. They only fit in one way so if it doesn't fit, turn it around. it will work as before but if you need any help just let me know.

http://www.peats.com/cgi-bin/catalog_v2.cgi?id=27291&type=product

whirlpool

spannerotoole wrote: »

You have an IDE drive.

This is what you need it costs 20 euro from peats of parnell street. Just plug the drive into the connector and the power bit in. They only fit in one way so if it doesn't fit, turn it around. it will work as before but if you need any help just let me know.

http://www.peats.com/cgi-bin/catalog_v2.cgi?id=27291&type=product

Ah okay, cheers! I think I get it now. So the yellow strap is connecting the hard-drive to the converter? And it's the converter which might be faulty? I think I'm understanding.

Will do a price check around the net on that product and see if I can get it cheaper than Peats but will probably just buy that.

Will let you know how I get on. Thanks again.

bette

whirlpool wrote: »

Ah okay, cheers! I think I get it now. So the yellow strap is connecting the hard-drive to the converter? And it's the converter which might be faulty? I think I'm understanding.

Will do a price check around the net on that product and see if I can get it cheaper than Peats but will probably just buy that.

Will let you know how I get on. Thanks again.

Do you know someone who will let you hitch your disk up to a PC (desktop or tower)? It's a simple matter of opening the case and attaching the disk to the IDE connex and a power molex. Would only take three of four minutes and it will show immediately whether the disk is readable or not. No point is throwing €20 at a possibly broken disk.

whirlpool

bette wrote: »

Do you know someone who will let you hitch your disk up to a PC (desktop or tower)? It's a simple matter of opening the case and attaching the disk to the IDE connex and a power molex. Would only take three of four minutes and it will show immediately whether the disk is readable or not. No point is throwing €20 at a possibly broken disk.

Thanks. I have a tower myself. Took a look inside tonight, removed the hard-drive and had a look. It's an SATA. Apparently my external hard drive is an IDE.

Is it possible to connect my ext. hard drive to a laptop? There're three laptops in my house at the moment.

bette

whirlpool wrote: »

Thanks. I have a tower myself. Took a look inside tonight, removed the hard-drive and had a look. It's an SATA. Apparently my external hard drive is an IDE.

Is it possible to connect my ext. hard drive to a laptop? There're three laptops in my house at the moment.

Have a good look at the mainboard. You have an IDE connex unless it's a super duper new one! You need that ribbon to connect. Pull the one from the back of your HDD and you'll see how to connect. The same connection is on your board. The ribbon is notched so there's no danger of connecting it wrong.

bonzodog2

Your tower hard drive may well be a SATA, but there's a good chance the DVD drive is IDE (tho you can get SATA DVDRW drives now), if so just plug the cables from the DVD into the drive from the external

whirlpool

@ bette & bonzodog2:

Thanks for the info, you were both right. I managed to connect my external hard drive to the mainboard.

I turned on the PC and the external hard drive was recognized. It showed up in Device Manager, which said it was "Installed and working correctly." It was also listed in My Computer.

However, a message popped up saying "This drive is not formatted. Format now?" I chose no.

Also, it was listing the drive as being 0% space used up and 0% free space.

I really don't want to lose the data on this hard drive. Is there a way to get access to it?

bonzodog2

Good to hear the drive is OK. There are many threads on this forum about data recovery, some software is free, some isn't. Try Recuva,Photorec(free) or R-Studio or GetDataBack. Some threads may list others. Search !

Importantly, if you find some files to recover, copy them to a different drive

Sometimes a complete restart of the machine may detect a drive that previously seemed to be unformatted

whirlpool

Thanks bonzodog2! Just a few things I don't understand:

bonzodog2 wrote: »

Good to hear the drive is OK. There are many threads on this forum about data recovery, some software is free, some isn't. Try Recuva,Photorec(free) or R-Studio or GetDataBack. Some threads may list others. Search !

Is recovery software the only way I'm going to get access to the files?

bonzodog2 wrote: »

Importantly, if you find some files to recover, copy them to a different drive

Why so? Is this external hard drive no longer useable?

bonzodog2 wrote: »

Sometimes a complete restart of the machine may detect a drive that previously seemed to be unformatted

I will restart the PC and see if that works, thanks!

bonzodog2

"Why so? Is this external hard drive no longer useable?"

This is more applicable to situations where there is a visible file system, and you're looking for lost/deleted files. However its always a good idea, to avoid overwriting disk locations with the recovery of 1 file, that contain another lost file. Get me ? In your case, where the disk appears unformatted, you can't write to it ATM anyway.

I'm not saying your disk is no longer usable.

Is there a lot of data to recover? Do you not have space to copy it to?
If space is an issue maybe you could use space on the 3 laptops you mentioned, as attached network drives and/or burn data to DVDR etc.

spannerotoole

Get a Linux Live disc, boot into that and see if it can read your drive.

whirlpool

Thanks guys. I'll be back with an update.