my f*#%!$% harddrive stopped working

[kamari]

Sorry, gotta vent for a sec. .I had an external drive with, oh, 40gb of photos and 30gb of music...with less than half of which was backed up. I could just jump out the window right about now. I can hear it making this funny "electronic" noise, almost like it's trying to startup but it just won't. **sigh** it's time for a drink...or 5

[HotHolly]

I feel your pain. Evil little things...

[*Mike*]

Bummer. Any chance you're a PPA member? They cover you for failed hard drives... Send the drive off for data recovery and they'll reimburse you up to $1600 (you pay a $250 deductible). Sounds like it may be worth it to ya...

[darktiger]

Is it plugged in using a ac adapter or does it get it's power from a usb cable. If it does, it might not be providing enough voltage for spinup. They start to act up when they get older....

[janetg]

and smugmug is offering a discount for new members from tpf - i backup all jpgs now to their account. (also 2 hd's and dvd as well) i've learned my lesson....3 times now. and they say, 3rd time's the charm.

[markfh]

Originally Posted by darktiger

Is it plugged in using a ac adapter or does it get it's power from a usb cable. If it does, it might not be providing enough voltage for spinup. They start to act up when they get older....

I've had several external cases fail on me and not the drives. Take the drive out and hook it up to a computer to see if the drive spins up and you can access the data before you do anything drastic.

[hhscr]

I have had the same thing happen to me that Mark mentioned. Electronics in the external case went bad, not the hard drive.

I always hate that feeling you get when the hard drive goes away.

Good Luck

[kamari]

Originally Posted by darktiger

Is it plugged in using a ac adapter or does it get it's power from a usb cable. If it does, it might not be providing enough voltage for spinup. They start to act up when they get older....

its gettin power from usb. i took it over to geek squad and they said its the hard drive and not the case. it's what they call a stage 2 data recovery...$299. this is the 2nd external drive that's done this to me. what i'm so PO'd with is that its only 3 months old...and i'd JUST tansferred 14 gigs of music to it from my sister's pc last weekend in va

[Rson]

Geek Squad=bunch of fools

Don't let them reformat your drive!!

[kamari]

as if it couldn't get any worse...
I got too impatient to wait and see if one of the IT folks at work could possibly be paid a couple of bucks on the side to see what they could do with the hard drive and I decided to take matters into my own hands and open it up. Not so easy. Well after scratching up the enclosure that's somehow bonded and refuses to pry open, I decide to plug the drive in and give it a good thwack.
The drive spins
The drive now won't read
But it spins

...wait! It's, it's, it's tryin to read....oh the autoplay screen popped up!!!...but nothing's happening. I'm getting SO close.

[markfh]

This is the reason why they show those intros to the stunt programs on tv... "Now kids, don't try this at home"...

[zeroendless]

Originally Posted by kamari

as if it couldn't get any worse...
I got too impatient to wait and see if one of the IT folks at work could possibly be paid a couple of bucks on the side to see what they could do with the hard drive and I decided to take matters into my own hands and open it up. Not so easy. Well after scratching up the enclosure that's somehow bonded and refuses to pry open, I decide to plug the drive in and give it a good thwack.
The drive spins
The drive now won't read
But it spins

...wait! It's, it's, it's tryin to read....oh the autoplay screen popped up!!!...but nothing's happening. I'm getting SO close.

Probably few bad sectors here and there, as long as you mobo see the drive (apparently it's is since the os sees it too) you should able to get the data back easy.

When you say nothing happended, what's that mean? you didn't see the drive shown on "my computer"?? May be it stop scanning to prevent a BSOD since it can't read part of the sectors. I just recovered a 1.8" compact drive from a mini vaio last month for my boss. Forced read gave me a BSOD and i have to image the drive with trueimage, mounted the drive and recovered 99.99% of all the data. Simple as that.

Try go to Control panel>administrative tool>computer management>disk management
See if windows sees the drive or not. if it does, right click on the disk and see if there's an option to assign drive letter. It's possible that the drive is good, windows just didn't assign a new drive letter for a new disk. It happened, you just need to assign the disk a letter before you can use it. If the partition is lost, there are plenty of recovery sw that you can try.

1) If the data is very valuable, you need to clone the sectors now to a new drive before the mechanical part completely screw up on you while you recovering the files. Try acronis true image.

2) Else, use windows tools to repair possible bad section or using Hitachi drive tool to do the same.

By the way, forget about GeekSquard and good luck.

[Rson]

I would get the drive out of the enclosure, slave it to a system and copy it over to an external device. You might lose your enclosure in the process. It is a lesser of 2 evils for the price of the data contained.

The drive in there is either a IDE or SATA. What is the model of the enclosure?

[Rson]

Oh yeah, a case of beer or 2 and I'll do it for you :)

I am a geek at heart.

I office in Grapevine behind Kirby's

[VietNinjaXTC]

^^ NIIIICE office...I wish I officed at a place that looked like that...haha.

Originally Posted by Rson

Geek Squad=bunch of fools

Don't let them reformat your drive!!

I couldn't agree more. I have openly heard a member of the Geek Squad @ Best Buy tell a customer who asked that they receive no proper training nor are they required to hold any recognized certifications. Basically...they are "self taught"...which is fine because that's what I am...but I don't charge people $300 to plug an HDD into another computer =].

I would take the HDD out of the external enclosure...hook it straight up to a computer as a secondary drive...access it through your existing boot drive and copy all important data off of the drive. Then if the drive is physically bad...dump it and get a new one. You can put the new one back in the enclosure and things will be back to "normal".

**EDIT: I just read what Rson said in the post before the picture of his office (I got distracted...haha) and that's pretty much ^^ that paragraph in a lot fewer words.