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Author Topic: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice  (Read 13782 times)

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Offline subvinorosa

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External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« on: December 13, 2010, 10:14:36 PM »
My WD external hard drive isn't working.  It's at the shop for repair.  The technician is asking if he can open it up.

The data there are irreplaceable.  I have no back up.  Not really smart of me but I was being lazy.  I didn't count on it borking on me.

Basically, it lights up when I connect the USB cable to the PC.  But it's not recognized at all.  I don't see it anywhere.

Before I have it opened up, is there any way to back up the data that's already in there?  I honestly don't know what to do and I don't want to be ripped off.

Thanks guys.
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Offline smokester

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #1 on: December 14, 2010, 04:20:08 AM »
Ok, I see that it's an external USB HDD that you have.  Has the guy in the shop taken the hard drive out and tried it with another USB hook up?  Quite often it is the USB adaptor that breaks leaving the hard drive intact but inoperable via the hardware it is running through.  I had a Freecom external HDD do the same thing, so I took out the drive and mounted it internally in the spare IDE bay and connection and it is running now on the machine I am using to write this.  The Freecom case and USB hook up is in the bin, but you can buy a similar set up on Ebay for a few pounds from China.

If the guy in the shop has removed the drive and plugged it into another USB adaptor and the dive still isn't being read, then you're buggered. :)
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Offline dweez

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #2 on: December 14, 2010, 08:14:18 AM »
subvinorosa, opening an external drive is not scary.  It's just an internal hard drive (hdd) inside an enclosure.  Allowing him to "take it out" should not damage the integrity of the drive in anyway but will allow him to connect to the hdd in other ways (connect it internally to another computer, use an hdd dock, use another enclosure). 

I had an external drive die on me once and it turned out just to be the enclosure.  The actual hard drive was fine when I removed it from the enclosure and used another.
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Offline smokester

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #3 on: December 14, 2010, 08:53:27 AM »
I wasn't sure whether the tech was going to split the actual HDD to see if the if head was crashing?

I have tried to save data by removing the physical disk of a HDD that had a head problem, and putting it in an old drive that was ok but had no data.  I discovered that you can only do that if you have 2 identical drives as any mismatch and it will reject it.
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Offline dweez

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #4 on: December 14, 2010, 11:49:03 AM »
Yeah, I tried to save a drive by swapping out the circuit board on it with an identical hdd but evidently it was a physical defect on the drive.
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Offline subvinorosa

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #5 on: December 15, 2010, 09:02:29 PM »
I'm lost. :D

Yeah, I had it done.  I really didn't understand what he wanted to do with it.  He'd passed on the message to my mom who passed it on to me and you know how that goes.

I haven't heard back yet.  I don't care if the drive gets broke as long as I recover all the pictures.

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Offline dweez

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #6 on: December 15, 2010, 11:15:52 PM »
He was trying to first determine if it was a defect in the actual hard drive or whether the casing (that has some electronics) was bad.  Bad casing == best case scenario.  After that, he probably wanted to put the hdd in another computer so that he could properly run diagnostic and recovery tools on it.
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Offline smokester

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #7 on: December 16, 2010, 06:18:13 AM »

Quote from: subvinorosa on December 15, 2010, 09:02:29 PM
I don't care if the drive gets broke as long as I recover all the pictures.

I'm afraid it's not really like a piggy bank where you can break it to get to the goodies inside, with a HDD, if it's broke it's useless and dead.
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Offline chekovsulu

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #8 on: December 17, 2010, 11:40:52 AM »
My Samsung hard drive recently decided to scare me, it also had a lot of irreplaceable pictures.  When I connected it to my Windows PC, Windows referred to it as RAW and wanted to format it.

I managed to extract the data using Power Data Recovery and everything's now saved on some other hard drives.

I don't know if that's the same problem, it's just what happened to me.
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Offline subvinorosa

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #9 on: December 18, 2010, 02:23:28 AM »
Thanks chek. :-*

I'll keep this in mind.  I'll probably know by Monday if it's gone or not.
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Offline smokester

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #10 on: December 18, 2010, 06:31:02 AM »
Quote from: subvinorosa on December 18, 2010, 02:23:28 AM
Thanks chek. :-*

I'll keep this in mind.  I'll probably know by Monday if it's gone or not.

Even if he loses the data but manages to get it working, you can still run a recovery program that will rebuild most of the binary into files as long as it hasn't had an extreme format run on it.  Shouldn't lose too much that way but if the disk has physical errors there isn't a great deal of hope.
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Don't put off until tomorrow, what you can put off until the day after.

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Offline subvinorosa

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #11 on: December 19, 2010, 04:36:10 AM »
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!


 ;D
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Offline Discover99

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #12 on: December 19, 2010, 01:39:22 PM »
i hope you'll get all your files back sub
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Offline subvinorosa

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #13 on: December 19, 2010, 06:49:55 PM »
Disco!  Where have you been?

Is this some sort of conspiracy?  Hmed suddenly pops up and you do too?

Hmmm...I'm thinking...
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Offline subvinorosa

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Re: External Hard Drive is broke; need advice
« Reply #14 on: January 16, 2011, 04:02:00 AM »
My external hard drive works perfectly now...as a paper weight.
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