I dropped my HD a couple of days ago and tested it today and it's not working. It is not a portable one. When I flip the switch, the light turns on but the power is definitely not running. It has a pretty strong case so I think it's just the power; the disk itself is probably ok (at least I keep telling myself that since it carries the only copies of all of my documents, coding, pictures, videos, etc. from my entire life... trying not to panic here ) I guess I just have to buy a new identical harddrive, open them both up and swap the disks. I'm not really a hardware expert though - any tips?
Hey, 1. Don't panic!..... [Yet!] 2. Be careful with it - You don't want to (try and) write anything to it at this point. 3. You don't need an "identical" drive - Just one that's at least as big. In fact, before buying another drive, I'd pull it out of it's case and mount it in the 'puter if possible - What interface does it use? Do you have a tower with a spare drive bay? I assume you're saying the power light comes on, but the disk never spins up? [This is probably a bad thing as PSU's very seldom go bad. :-(] Was it powered up when it took the dive? Good luck, if swapping it to a different PSU doesn't do the trick there are still a few alternatives..... Cheers, Ian
Thanks for the reply. The worst part is that I was just thinking a few days ago that I should copy everything onto my office computer but I decided to wait until this week instead. I have a tower at work with a spare bay, I can try that when I go to work tomorrow. I'm not sure what interface. It was off and unplugged. Yes the light comes on but the disk doesn't spin
Friggin' Murphy!..... That's a *very* good thing - Hopefully, the heads were nicely parked out of the way and didn't suffer too much. It's certainly possible the fall killed the PSU or more likely broke a solder joint - Fingers crossed that your (optimistic!) diagnosis is correct and the drive itself is OK..... Good luck, please report back, Cheers, Iab
Take it out of its enclosure and plug it in to a PC. If it works, get all the data off it right then and there. If it doesn't work, send it off to a recovery specialist and cross your fingers. Drives are so utterly cheap these days that you can buy a great big handful to use as backups. There's an increasing amount of non anecdotal evidence that drives greater than 1TB from all manufacturers are pretty hit and miss, so stick to 1TB and below. Western Digital, Samsung and non 7200.11 Seagates are decent drives especially if you mix them up and across different PC's. Toss in an internet based back up service and your chances of losing all your data shrinks to close to zero. But that's only if you back up when you are supposed to. I prefer a JBOD (just a bunch of discs) array on all my PC's for the sake of simplicity and no headaches. I use Syncback Pro and it squirts all the new data to all my other drives on all my other PC's, so any single drive I own contains all my data. It's excellent and cheap. http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbpro.html
Just a word of warning: r/w heads aren't the only sensitive mechanism in today's drives. The spindles themselves can be damaged in an unpowered drive in a fall of less than 7 inches onto a hard surface (desk). I accidentally tipped over a running and active WD external HD and it hit the desk with a pretty solid smack. This was just a tip over, yet the spindle was damaged just enough to turn the drive into a vibrating back massager.
Well I opened up the enclosure and the power cords were loose from the drive, so I put them back in. Now the drive spins up but the LED turns red and then the whole thing shuts off (it's supposed to turn blue). So I guess there is something wrong with the drive after all I tried putting it in my desktop tower as well but I was having booting issues unrelated to this. So I guess from here my only option is to send it out to somebody?
If you're having booting issues that are unrelated, you need make sure you set the new drive to slave and that the original hard drive is set to master. As a last resort before taking the drive to a shop, try buying an external drive enclosure and putting the hard drive in it. You can then connect it to your pc using a USB cable. I used one of these Vantec enclosures for my old hard drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010090092+50001453&name=Vantec&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-_-ComputerCases-_-NA-_-NA
You haven't yet tried to power it up from another source though, correct? Your report on the LED dance should be telling...... Korr - Thx for the heads up on "weak" (?) spindles - "Wasn't like that back in my day!" Cheers, Ian
Plugged it into the desktop again... BIOS does not detect it. Also tried booting SpinRite from floppy, which also does not detect it. The booting issues were because I dual boot windows and Linux from separate harddrives. Apparently grub didn't like it when I replaced the windows drive with the external. But anyways... I think it's safe to assume the issue is with the drive itself so I'm going to ship it off to some specialists. Anybody have any recommendations? I'm thinking of using Gillware.
I'm sure you've checked, but make sure the HD jumpers are set to slave. It's not going to boot. If you like, i can analyze the drive for you at no charge even if I can recover the data. Just recovered one last week. I do IT for a living and would be glad to help.
They still do that on hard drives? wow - I'd have thought some "auto detect" would be used these days. Jedi
Most clean room data recovery places charge $1500 or more for their services. I took a crashed external drive to a local place that charges a $149 diagnostic fee, and a flat fee of around $650 for recovery (depends on the size of the hard drive). They said my drive had a head crash so nothing could be saved, so I can't vouch for their recovery rate, although they claim it is like 86%. You can call them to talk about your situation: http://www.ecodatarecovery.com/ BT
