Need Help For External Hard Drive

DazMarz

Hi,

I have a 1tb hard-drive and I have a lot of data stored on it. Today, it has stopped working. I'm fairly sure that my housemates dropped or knocked it, even though they deny it; it was not where I had left it last night and so on.

Whenever I try to power it up, it makes beeping and scratching noises and my laptop can't detect it.

Is it possible to get it repaired or possible to recover the data or transfer the data to a new external hard drive? Does anyone know a good and fast service for doing this?

Thanks.

hearny

Not good news I'm afraid, the drive sounds like its taken a knock alright, the scratching noise is probably the heads coming in contact with the platters (that store the data), and that is very bad.

Stop using the device immediately and look for a data recovery specialist (they can be expensive).

Was that your only copy of the data and is it important data or something replaceable like music and videos.

Dont give it to somebody who tells you they will chance recovering stuff from it, the more its used now the less chance you have of recovery.

riclad

You could buy a caddy ,2.5 or 3.5 carefully take out the drive and put it in the caddy, in my experience a 3.5inch sata drive needs a power supply,
caddy with power supply.
2.5inch sata just needs a 2.5 in caddy,no power supply.
see http://www.memoryc.ie/products/description/NEON_3_5-SATA_IDE_External_Desktop_Hard_Drive_Enclosure-Black_Edition/index.html

my 1tb sata drive uses a power supply.
cost 30 euro,3,5 caddy with psu,

2.4 inch sata caddy, no psu, cost 15 euro.
JUST BE careful, dont touch ,drive pcb,circuit board.

ITS possible data, connection ,or power cable to drive,

is loose,or broken,
or pcb is broken,
inside,case is 2 cables,power,data, pcb,to connect drive to 2 cables, frame that holds the hardrive.
ie hardrive itself maybe ok.
cables are easy to detach.
if you have a pc, you could install drive in it,
if drive is sata and your pc ,has sata connectors.

DazMarz

Thanks for the replies! But a friend of mine who's an absolute genius with these things has come around... and has already sorted it!

I have absolutely no idea what he did to it... nor do I think I could understand it if I did know... but anyway. It's sorted. It must have been something relatively simple, cos after about 15 minutes of him tinkering with it, it was back up and running.

Thanks to everyone!

hearny

Fair play to him, glad to hear you got it sorted, sounded like it was going to be a big job.

A little scare is a good thing, you can put it down as a close call and keep backups of any irreplaceable data.

P.S. You owe your mate a few pints

bonzodog2

Great to hear you got sorted, but, .... learn a lesson - BACK UP! for irreplaceable data, keep copies in more than 1 place, disks DO fail. More than 1 physical location and cloud storage too.

DazMarz

Oh don't I just know it!!! I'm going into PC World or somewhere first thing tomorrow and getting another hard-drive and backing the whole lot up.

quaidox

maybe you could ask your friend how he/she got it working again and post it here? i am in a similar situation trying to recover data from a friends failed hard drive. it's currently in the freezer as i have exhausted every other recovery method i have heard of!!

bonzodog2

What make/model was it BTW ?
Someone asked me to look at a dropped 1TB external recently, (can't recall the make just now ...) and it had a non-standard drive inside, had the USB port directly on the drive PCb. It was a good bit thicker than the standard SATA laptop drive. IIRC it was a WD drive.

quaidox

a usb connector on the hdd?? weird!!! never seen one of them before!

yoyo

quaidox wrote: »

a usb connector on the hdd?? weird!!! never seen one of them before!

Yeah WD started doing this, caused a good bit of uproar as you could imagine. Couldn't even de-solder the USB connector and solder a SATA cable to the board either

Nick

RUCKING FETARD

DazMarz wrote: »

Thanks for the replies! But a friend of mine who's an absolute genius with these things has come around... and has already sorted it!

DazMarz

I've got myself a new 2tb hard drive today to back up everything (Seagate brand is the new one).

The one I thought was broken is a 1tb Lacie.

And as I've said, I've no idea what my friend did to it. From what I could gather from his mad scientist-like muttering and mumbling as he fiddled around was something to do with a slightly loose power connection?

I don't think there was actually any damage done to the disk or the reader or anything integral to the HDD itself, which may have presented much more serious problems. I think I was blessed by the fact that the drive was off while it was moved/fell/whatever.

rubadubduba

sounds like ya got lucky, i dont think it was anthing to do with power connectors, if it was the drive would'nt of powered up, sounds more like one of the heads got
stuck and would'nt recoil back to start hence the scratching noise. take everything off that drive and bin it.

bonzodog2

Or just use it for stuff that it doesn't matter if you lose it, like movie downloads.

riclad

the power to the hd drive could have got loose, ie power comes on, no power goes to drive,
sata uses simple slot in power ,data cable,s
similar to a flat usb cable.
ie theres 2 cables from pcb, data,power, that slot into rear of sata drive.