Hey people

I have this hard drive in an External Box and connected to my PC via USB. I left it turned on over night to download a few things onto it, when I woke this morning the Hard Drive was switched on but my computer wasn't reading it.....I turned the hard drive off and waited for it to cool down, plugged it back in and my PC still isn't reading it. can anyone help???? This hard drive stores so much stuff which I can't afford to lose so any help would be really appreciated, thanks folks.


Peace

Is the drive spinning up when you power it on ?

No it's not

I would check the connections in the external box and if they are all correct, chuck the drive in the PC... do you know how to do that?

Sorry, I was being vague earlier it's a laptop not a desktop. Should i get a new external box??

But there's power to the box and the led's come on ?

Is it possible to remove the drive from it's enclosure and try connecting it to a SATA header on the motherboard just to test ? You'd be looking to see if BIOS picks it up during the POST/Bootup process.

e2a:

Just saw you are running it on a laptop so scratch the above, trying it in another enclosure is probably the cheapest way of testing the actual drive

sata, bios wtf....talk to me like I am computer retarded


e2a: ok felix will get a new external box and let you know what happens

Would want to see if the computer saw the drive as it was booting but I'm not sure how Windoze handles USB during the boot process. Hopefully it's the enclosure rather than the drive

Right well I hope its the enclosure. If it isn't am I fucked?? Is there any way of recovering whats on it??

If the drive itself has gone there are plenty of companies that can remove the actual platters the data is stored on and in 9 times out of 10 recover all the data that was on that drive but it will cost you. A quick search on Google shows a few companies offering data recovery services for between £100 - £200 to recover from a completely dead drive.

Might I recommend a comprehensive backup program for the future ?

Please do. Is there any bit of hardware out there where i can store huge amounts of data on without having to worry about whether or not it will die on me?


e2a: were talking as if my hard drive is dead felix, stop it! There is still hope!!

Just tried turning the Hard drive on again in the old external box and the LED light comes on and there is a faint clicking-like sound coming from the hard drive itself. Sound familiar

Depends on how much you want to spend but I'd recommend something like the NetGear ReadyNAS, not exactly portable but as it's RAID'ed you don't have to worry about individual drive failure. Other than that I'd recommend backing up to an online source if you have less than 2Gb as most online backup companies offer up to 2GB free, if we're talking tens or hundreds of GB and it's vital data then the only option you really have is two hard drives, one the master and one a secondary drive. Use the master as per normal and backup the entire contents to the secondary drive at regular intervals. Really does depend how important that data is to you

I have 4 1000GB & 2 500GB External Hard Drives, the one thats died on me is a 1000GB one with about 800GB of 720p Blu-Ray movies which i've been painstakingly downloading for over 2years, about 150GB of music discographies aswell as irreplaceable documents. As I said earlier, is there any like 100TB data storage units I can buy without having to worry about it dying??

Anything can die at the end of the day so no I don't believe there is a small portable unit that could easily store 1TB or data without it ever going kaput but if you buy a RAID unit that has multiple drives you can survive the loss of a drive and replace it without loosing your data but they are not going to be as small and portable as a single USB drive. However your data will be much safer, I run one of those ReadyNAS boxes with 4 x 1 TB drives in it, when that's RAID'ed I get three TB of storage and if you need to expand you just replace the drives one by one with higher capacity models. That's where I store all my movies, music and pictures

hmmm that sounds pretty good....not really looking for portability more security so something like that doesn't sound to bad. what is RAID??

NAS as felix suggested ....is how industry do it ..so worth thinking about
www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&field-keywords=Netgear+ReadyNAS&x=0&y=0

.if it was me ..I would be thinking of building a small pc/server to do the same job ....that way I got a spare pc if my main one goes down ..gives you a few more options ..with nas you still need another pc/lappy to access it ..and some other limitations over normal pc architecture but they do the job

thanks weed g


Back to the HD problem would freezing it help my situation???

I would leave freezing it as the step before putting it in the bin

best bet is try it in a different pc/lappy (local library?) ..and if still the same take it apart and try connecting the drives directly to a mobo ...if you start a small fire at the opposite end of the library there may just be enough time to strip down one of their pc's and try it

feeling flush then for just £45,869 you can get a HP StorageWorks 9000 Virtual Library System 10 TB System Hard drive array

Have u tried a new / different usb cable ? the hd might need a trigger signa l, that it's not getting
a seagate i have does

A good solution but these units use less electricity and are quite a bit smaller than a PC case, also the fan is not too noisy either.

@Suspect,

Don't do anything that would risk further harming your data if you are going to use one of those HDD recovery services.

Basically RAID is a collection of disks with your data spanned across all of them so if one fails it can be replaced and the data on it rebuilt from what is on the remaining drives.

Yeah i tried a different USB cable to no avail. As I said the LED comes on, the hard drive just clicks and i've gone into control panel>admin tools>computer management>disk management and its not being read at all. Part of me thinks because it was left on all night downloading stuff onto it, it over heated or something.

Will definitely look into getting RAID in future.

use a different usb port ..but before you plug it in ...have device manager open ..and see if the lappy detects the new usb device
also
its possible its only the electrical/power supply part of the 'external drive' thats broken ..leaving the actual hd/data intact

Hi
Many of the usb external drives hold 2 drives, you can buy one of those and mirror/raid1
do not use raid0, this will work but its software raid and unreliable,
the best way is to build a server ect and use decent hardware raid as Weed says,
i use a 3ware raid card with 8 drives in raid 50, i can loose two drives to failure
with no data loss, if your a home user and dont want to spend a grand on storage array
then the usb externals with sofware raid are a good option for the cost,
but as Felix says you cant beat a decent back up program, i find acronis nice n quick
hmmmm 100 1 tb drives at 53 quid each thats 5,300 pounds for 100tb pretty cheap
JS

Sounds like the tick of death im afraid - dont think the freezer will help but its worth a go.

If the data is of any really value then it should be possible to recover it but you will need to send it to a data recovery company.

How do the data recovery folks recover the data?? is it at all possible for me to do it from home?? download software etc???

just out of curiosity have you tried connecting the ext hdd to a pc running linux ? i did this recently when a 500gb ext hdd died ..weirdly linux managed to read the drive enough to recover 300gb .

I haven't got linux though and i don't think its a problem with the ext hdd not being read its more to do with the motor inside the hdd....its almost like the motor is trying to make the disc spin but it clicks over

thats exactly what my drive was doing when used with windows xp ..totally buggered ..but connected to ubuntu it span enough to retrieve the data ..one last spin before its demise at it were .

well I guess its something i should look into...i read somewhere that turning the drive upside down and shaking it a little while turning it on should get the discs to spin, any truth in that??

Depending on what the problem is they usually have the same drive - if its the circuit board they will replace that and copy off the data - if its the head or motors they will probably take off the platters and set them up in on a working setup and copy off the data.

When u open the drive u need to be in a 'clean' environment as dust can damage the drive heads - plus u need to have the same hardware and a bit of elecy know how - i personally wouldnt do it my self if i valued the data i was trying to recover. There are some companies who can recover data from drives which have been in floods etc but u need the rite equipment.

From what u described earlier the drive is spinning up but u are getting a tick tick sound, this is usually the drive heads being f*cked.

The more you shake / mess with it the more chance you will do damage to the platters if the head is smashing into them - the tick tick is the drive heads/arm resetting trying to find the starting cylinder but as the head is fucked it just loops round is my guess to what has happened.

Did perhaps the drive take a dive off a desk?

No actually thats just it, when i went to sleep everything was fine, azureus was downloading family guy season 5 onto the hard drive and when i woke up the hard drive was still on but nothing was being read on the PC. Im the only one in the house so it couldn't of been anyone else. Last night though there was thunder and lightning like right outside my window....sounds dumb but that couldn't of been a factor right??

I would suspect that if there was a lightning strike it would have fried things more obviously rather than just the drive.

It is possible the electronics which connect the drive to the usb port (basically a ide/sata -> usb adapter) could be fucked.

As someone else mentioned if you can remove the actual hard drive from its 'caddy' and plug it into a desktop directly then you should be able to remove the caddy electronics from the figuring out problem plus connecting the drive directly to the machine is usually more reliable than usb. I have had a serial ata drive cause issues with the old molex power supply side (4 pins which a plastic power thing plugs into) and then when a serial ata power cable was used (long strip connector) all was ok - most sata drives only have the sata power connector.

If you power up the drive when its not in the caddy and hold it in the air you should feel a gyroscope type effect - not sure the best way to describe it but a spinning platters/disk in a drive when slowly moved about in the air does have a noticeable different feel to it than a drive which is not powered up.

Mate of mine manages the computer systems for a large organisation. One of the drives in one of their servers died, and it had a load of login info on it. He eventually got it to read one last time by freezing it overnight, connecting it up and when it still wasn't spinning properly whacking it on the edge of a desk! Hey presto, it span up and he was able to get the stuff off it. I've tried it myself but in my case I've always been trying to recover big files and this kind of fix generally doesn't give you very long before the warped platters/heads lock up again. If you're trying to recover gigs of stuff it's probably a lost cause unless you send it to one of the specialists mentioned previously.

The freezer trick does sometimes work - try to put the drive in an air tight container though to reduce any water vapour which may condense and freeze on the platters.

Sorry am late to the party.

As well as all the previous suggestions, I would suggest trying another enclosure and power supply with the drive to rule out that as being at fault.

I would also try it with another PC or at least another OS as weirdly enough, this is sometimes enough to get them working.

Realistically, if the drive *has* popped - that's your data gone. It costs *huge* money to send drives off for data recovery, and success is far from guaranteed.

In future, if your data is *that* irreplaceable, I would suggest frequent backups. You can use regular DVD-R discs for backing up 4.5GB at a time, and double-sided DVD-Rs store 9GB or so.

As they come down in price, maybe look into writeable Blu-Ray discs for backing up large amounts of data.

Hope you get it sorted.

fuck sake, im gonna have to start saving up for the data recovery lab. What about all my pics, vids of ganja, grows, me with ganja etc won't the data recovery people tell the old bill?

it also could be the ciruit board on the disk Ive swapped just the circuit board before now and got the drive back but I did know that the board was nacked.

Hindsight is always nice but if your data is that important i wouldnt trust it to a individual nas box / external drive thing, u need to have proper backups in place, the simplest thing is to simply have 2 drives and run a very simply script to keep them in sync once every few days - there is a nice windows program called robocopy as you dont have the luxury of rsync (unless you want to mess with cgywin and a lot of other crap)

That is to say if you cannot be arsed writing tonnes of dvds.

I hear what your saying....i've never had a hard drive die on me before so I became a little complacent. Will never make the same mistake twice i can assure you

Tis a painful lesson only needed to be learnt once.