I dropped my external hard drive.
July 25th, 2013
If it’s not fixable is there any other way to get the data off? Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Take it to a repair shop, they might be able to fix or at least they’d get the data off it to another hard drive. I am pretty sure that your data would be intact.
Swap cases to another external HDD Case
Get a direct-connect cord [SATA -> USB]
If you don’t have either, find a computer geek friend who does, we all have these lying around =)
Though, if things are just bent, mess with them till it works, copy everything off then RMA/Replace it.
Repair shop will probably just try a cable and that fails, tell you its scrap metal. If there is nothing imperative on it, consider it lost.
Friend of mine did the same thing recently, not much you can do.
Put it in the freezer, top shelf preferably. Then I guess you try to eat it or something to extract info from it. Try NFTS if you hear a clicking. Not clickings, as in plural, just clicking.
Oilers23 replied: This sucks, it won't connect to my computer but it does turn on and the computer recognizes something. Exact message is "USB Device not recognized" then something about a malfunction. Is there any way to get it working again, I took it apart and besides the USB connection pushed in a little bit I think it's all fine. I bent it back out and it seems to plug in again.
If it's not fixable is there any other way to get the data off? Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
my mate dropped there and would not work so i put in my computer and it worked fine
Mp3 King replied: Well, there you go. Case solved.Oilers23 replied: This sucks, it won't connect to my computer but it does turn on and the computer recognizes something. Exact message is "USB Device not recognized" then something about a malfunction. Is there any way to get it working again, I took it apart and besides the USB connection pushed in a little bit I think it's all fine. I bent it back out and it seems to plug in again.
If it's not fixable is there any other way to get the data off? Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
my mate dropped there and would not work so i put in my computer and it worked fine
Wow, its not case solved.
Is the drive in the enclosure SATA or IDE?
Does he have a cable to plug it in with?
Does his motherboard have the slot to even plug it into? Old PC’s don’t have SATA.
Does his PSU have the ability to power this drive? Assuming the original enclosure can’t.
This is far from “solved” BUT. Thanks MP3 King, that is a suggestion I forgot to mention.
You forget to test it on another computer, Basic? You sure aren’t helpdesk material yet. I mean, no offense or anything but come on.
S&P replied: You forget to test it on another computer, Basic? You sure aren't helpdesk material yet. I mean, no offense or anything but come on.I have a similar scenario, external hard drive works fine plugged into PC, but laptop doesn’t want to know, pain in the arse juggling stuff around with pen drive from one place to another but its still useable, apparently formatting the drive should do the trick, wont bother myself cant be hassled with moving 500gb to another drive, but worth trying
happened to me, and I had to take it to a shop for repairs…
take out the drive and connect it to your PC via SATA leads.
if your computer recognizes it and you can access it the HDD is fine.
Thanks for the help guys, I opened her up and it’s SATA, but I don’t have a cable and can’t find the leads anyways. I’m not exactly a computer whiz and I’m a student so I don’t really have the money to spend to send it to a repair shop. Maybe I’ll try the tech guys at school, they are usually pretty good.
Anyone have an idea where I could find the SATA leads? I would have thought they’d be pretty apparent. Also, this hard drive came with an external plug in, can it run without it? I imagine it ran some kind of fan in addition to the hard drive, will it run without power now (say I put it in a case)?
Edit: Alright I took it to the tech guys at my uni and they helped me out, the HD is still working, all I should need is a new enclosure, . Thanks for the help here gents.
S&P, are YOU helpdesk material yet? You told him to try to eat it, didn’t you?
Glad you got it working.
Also @PJCPJC exactly what I was thinking lolz. Though, I am still trying to figure out wtf NFTS is…
I think he was trying to recommend NTFS, but how does one “try” NTFS on a dead hdd? o.O
BTW S&P. Sometimes we forget things when we are not there physically.
Been a PC Tech for over 10 years. Without seeing everything there is to work with things get overlooked.