recovering extrernal hard drive

[rogerdv]

Today my boss brougth to me an external drive that suffered an accident. Seems that the electric power failed right during a copy, and now the drive is useless. Widnwos doesnt sees it, neither Linux, and also I used USBInspector but nothing, it cant see anything but the mouse in the usb ports. Is there any way to save the disk, or should I notify my boss that it is definitely dead?

 

[owensdj]

I think most external drives have standard internal drives in them. You could try taking out the internal drive to see if you can access it directly.

If the data is really that important there are data recover companies that can get it for you, but it'll be very expensive.

 

[rogerdv]

Judging from the size, it should be a laptop hard drive. Also, the enclosure is a rubber protected one, seems a bit hard to open, but I will try your suggestion. Really I dont care about the information, probably it is just movies, our concern is to save the disk.

 

[Charlie98]

Judging from the size, it should be a laptop hard drive. Also, the enclosure is a rubber protected one, seems a bit hard to open, but I will try your suggestion. Really I dont care about the information, probably it is just movies, our concern is to save the disk.

I wouldn't waste my time if that's all it is. If the drive is having problems now, it's most likely not going to get better... I wouldn't trust it for anything after this.

Spend the $100 for a new portable...

 

[Elixer]

I wouldn't waste my time if that's all it is. If the drive is having problems now, it's most likely not going to get better... I wouldn't trust it for anything after this.

Spend the $100 for a new portable...

Yeah, I have to agree.
If the drive isn't damaged then the controller of the external is most likely the problem. However, it also might have suffered a spike, and killed one or both.

Best case, drive is OK, external unit is dead.

 

[HardcoreRobot]

the external drive i was using for storage on my DVR died recently. would not power up at all.

hacked the enclosure to pieces (did NOT want to be opened lol), plugged the drive into a new enclosure and it was as if nothing had happened.

its worth a shot IMO, since its not that much work really

 

[Russwinters]

what kind of enclosure/manufacturer?

what is the drive inside (make, model etc)

does your bios see the drive at least? (I would avoid booting in to windows with it plugged in if you can for now)


google MHDD, throw it on a floppy, cd or flash stick and run that on it, dos based HDD tester, if you can see the drive and scan the surface then your in good shape, then you need to determine if the enclosure is one of the newer ones that does on the fly hardware encryption to the drive (western digitals do this on both their 3.5inch and 2.5 externals now, the 2.5 are even harder because they now combined the HDD PCB with the SATA to USB conversion board, and added encryption via hardware chip (initio, symwave, oxford, jmicron)

 

[UaVaj]

not sure if this applies to all external enclosure.

some external usb drive has a translated file system.

seagate 3tb with the external usb3 controller. showed up as a single partition connected on external usb3. if connected directly to sata on motherboard. shows up 2 partition and data unreadable. connect back to external usb3 controller. everything is fine.





looks like the external usb controller is fried. if you can get another identical external drive. swapping the controller might save the data. then just reformat the drive and use it internally.

 

[MunzMan]

what kind of enclosure/manufacturer?

what is the drive inside (make, model etc)

does your bios see the drive at least? (I would avoid booting in to windows with it plugged in if you can for now)


google MHDD, throw it on a floppy, cd or flash stick and run that on it, dos based HDD tester, if you can see the drive and scan the surface then your in good shape, then you need to determine if the enclosure is one of the newer ones that does on the fly hardware encryption to the drive (western digitals do this on both their 3.5inch and 2.5 externals now, the 2.5 are even harder because they now combined the HDD PCB with the SATA to USB conversion board, and added encryption via hardware chip (initio, symwave, oxford, jmicron)

Russ Winter's can a controller be swapped on a HGST 640gb hard drive? If not, is there any way to get files off the hard drive? Model number is:
Hgst Hts541064a9e680 03MAR13
0J26331 DA5218

Locked. 5 year old thread.
Please create a new thread if you need help.
Usandthem