External hard drive suddenly not working

Helghast said:
wtf, you can buy a whole new good system for that. I'm just gonna send it to a normal pc store tomorrow.
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To do what? They cannot help you. They could help if it was a software issue. This is a hardware issue.

It's like not wanting a specialist surgeon to perform an operation at the hospital, thinking they could get the same thing done at their GP.
 
PostmanPot said:
To do what? They cannot help you. They could help if it was a software issue. This is a hardware issue.

It's like not wanting a specialist surgeon to perform an operation at the hospital, thinking they could get the same thing done at their GP.
Click to expand...

PC stores fix hardware issues. Besides it's either that or I try something myself.
 
Helghast said:
Guess I'm fscked then.
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If you've mailed SouthBit (mentioning that you're a MyBb member) and received a price that is still unaffordable, then I guess you are. You could save up for a few months and do it at a later stage.
 
You could try deleting the drive from devices and powering your machine down, then power on again with drive unplugged. Once machine has powered up plug drive in again.
 
Helghast said:
Guess I'm fscked then.
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It's your choice. Send it to the professionals to get the data retrieved, or don't.

There is no other way to retrieve data off a crashed hard drive without the potential of completely ruining the device.
 
So you removed the HDD while it was still busy working and now you hear a beeping noise. This is called 'stiction' where the heads stick to the platter. The drive was busy reading/writing and when you removed powered it continued to do this until the platters stopped spinning. Instead of the heads safely parking on the parking ramp, they are not stuck on the disk surfaces.

If the data is required there is unfortunately no DIY solution. The drive needs to be opened, the heads removed from the disk surface and possibly a new head assembly installed, and then the hard drive imaged on special equipment to work around the bad areas which have formed from the head-to-platter contact.

I would suggest either saving up for recovery of move on. We could give a good discount on our public pricing if need be. As suggested by others, the only data recovery labs are in Cape Town and Gauteng, there are none in other provinces. We get jobs from all over SA, with cheap cost of overnight couriers these days it's easy to serve the whole country.

My advice is to not let anyone tamper with it if it's important to you, I cannot stress how many drives we see which have been opened by a 'computer guy' and destroyed. What would have been a doable recovery becomes impossible, so just be careful.

Good luck.
 
ponder said:
Not all external 2.5" drives have the usb port integrated onto the drives pcb.

If it does have a integrated usb port and you have some technical skills you can bypass the usb controller & solder a temp sata connector to recover data assuming the usb port/controller is the cuprit & it's not encrypted.
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With encrypted drives you do exactly the same. Imaging. The only difference is that after imaging you must put back original PCB (or identical one in case the original is not working).
 
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