How to rescue a Hard Drive

I have an external Seagate HD attached to my Mac and it suddenly stopped being recognized after a year of duty.

The problem began with beeping coming from the HD and instead of showing the HD on my desktop it showed a folder with the HD name.

I rebooted and now the HD isnt beeping but I get nothing recognized on my computer at all.

However, I can hear the HD spinning.

Thoughts ?

(I am not a tech savvy guy)

 

Hie thee to a Disc Recovery specialist. They're plentiful & affordable.

 

Whoa! I think that's probably a little bit of an overreaction at this stage.

Firstly, do you have a backup of the thing anywhere? [Hopefully yes, as that takes a *lot* of pressure off! ]

Do you recall the "sequence" of the beeps? [Long, short, spacing, how many etc?] It was trying to tell you something and we can probably figure it out given the details. [Model # would be helpful here.]

Do you have another 'puter you can plug it into?

My WAG is it's still OK (no strange noises is good) but has lost it's "index" for some reason (not the correct term, but you get the idea) - Given time, that can be rebuilt from the contents.

Cheers,
Ian

 

I'd be really careful going to a disk recovery specialist. They suck you in with a low price to 'analyze' the disk then will come back with a big number to actually get the data. Maybe its justified but be ready to spend at least $1000 with any of them. And most don't guarantee any results.

I was quoted $2100 to recover my outlook file last fall. When I sounded hesitant, they dropped it $500. But again no guarantee of success.

Be sure to Google any company you are thinking of using.

Check some of the software that is out there. You'll probably have much better luck.

 

I'd assume it is a USB HD?? If so I had a similar problem after playing a bit it looked like it was a nogo, so I opened it up and the USB interface was shot was my conclusion , swapping this board is very easy and it usually is no more $40-60.

 

remove it & place into another USB(3) doc would be a start. Dont know the problem though.

 

Have you tried a different cable between the computer and the drive?

Mike

 

Also try removing the HDD from the container. You can get a USB to HDD cable and connect without a case.

 

Try removing it from case and putting to the other one (I can send you a simple usb case for free). If it wont help, try Disk Utility in mac checking that disk is recognized. You can then have options to check drive and repair permissions. If it wont help - professional disk recovery is the only way to do it if you have "expensive" data there. When I had a little more time on hands data recovery was my hobby lol

 

Here's a good trick from someone who's spent most of his career as a system's admin - freeze it.

There are two ways hard drives go kaput. The first is that they get dropped, a head hits a platter, head is damaged, game over. Call up one of those $1K+ data recovery places.

The second is that a manufacturing defect has left the disk in a state where it's slowly killing it's bearing and the disk is getting slower over time. Eventually it can't spin fast enough and the head can't read data properly.

Put the disk inside two to three ziploc bags (trying to keep moisture out of the equation) and put it in the freezer overnight. Next day, remove it from the freezer and quickly attach it to the computer. The theory is that the different metals inside the drive shrink differently and increase tolerances (loosen components) which increases the speed ... you'll have only 10 to 15 minutes before the metal in the spindle heats up again and it stops working.

I can't tell you if the theory is true or not, but I can tell you that of the dozen or so dead hard drives I've tried to recover this way in the last 18 years, it's worked on 75% of them or so.

 

Can I borrow one? One of my drives seems to have gone a month or two ago, its showing a SMART fault and wont let the computer boot without it being removed. I don't think the drive is physically dead though, I believe an old windows backup image got corrupted that is on the same HDD.

 

Try it on a Windows computer before you do anything extreme...

Jedi

 

Sure, if Ill be on C&C on Sun, I can bring it...

 

Yup, used the freezer trick many times, but 1-2 hours worked for me (but I only used 1 zip lock bag).

 

Just had a backup disc on one of my iMacs go out. Can't read it on other systems either. Just got another 1T ext drive for $55 to replace it. The failed one will go under the hammer tomorrow. It was an Iomega about 2.5 yrs old. Sucks these things are disposable. But as a backup it's easy. If primary I'd try recovering on my own.

 

This thread is reminding me to backup my backups.

My wife used to laugh at me until I found a couple files she's modified and saved over.

One can never have enough backups!