Dead HD

Anybody have any experience with recovering data off of a dead external hard drive?

smoke wrote:Anybody have any experience with recovering data off of a dead external hard drive?

Unfortunately yes...

First thing is most important, DON'T TRY TO WRITE ANYTHING ON THAT HDD.

Then your options are as follow.

1. Try the HDD on another PC or at least on another USB port on your PC.
2. Try to take the disc out of it's casing and connecti it directly to your motherboard. In many cases it isn't the HDD that is gone, it is HDD casing interface.
3. If that doesn't help and you can't see any data google HDD recovery software. There are some free programs that can help you copy files from that HDD to another one
4. If previous steps doesn't help then there's just one thing left. You can take the HDD to companies specialised for retrieving data from bad HDD drives. If your problem is caused by HDD electronics and not by HDD plates there is 99% chance that you will get your data. But be aware that this isn't cheap so you have to take a good thinking about how important the data on that HDD is to you.

Last but not least, welcome to the club of people who has learned importance of backup the hard way.

Scorpyo wrote:

smoke wrote:Anybody have any experience with recovering data off of a dead external hard drive?

Unfortunately yes...

First thing is most important, DON'T TRY TO WRITE ANYTHING ON THAT HDD.

Then your options are as follow.

1. Try the HDD on another PC or at least on another USB port on your PC.
2. Try to take the disc out of it's casing and connecti it directly to your motherboard. In many cases it isn't the HDD that is gone, it is HDD casing interface.
3. If that doesn't help and you can't see any data google HDD recovery software. There are some free programs that can help you copy files from that HDD to another one
4. If previous steps doesn't help then there's just one thing left. You can take the HDD to companies specialised for retrieving data from bad HDD drives. If your problem is caused by HDD electronics and not by HDD plates there is 99% chance that you will get your data. But be aware that this isn't cheap so you have to take a good thinking about how important the data on that HDD is to you.

Last but not least, welcome to the club of people who has learned importance of backup the hard way.

Thanks Marijo,

I have already tried using other computers.  None will recognize it either.

I believe it was the original HDD power supply  gone bad that started the cascade of events that smoked this HD.  I have already removed it from it's casing and bought a $20 SATA to USB connector in hopes that it would be a cheap workaround to be able to get the data off of it.  It worked for one or two boots,  but now I think something's gone bad within the HD itself.

I don't think software recovery will work,  whatever has gone bad isn't allowing the drive to interface with any computer ( no regonition as a E: F: or any drive when connected) although I do get the plug and play "bong" sound through windows that you get when plugging in and unpligging devices.  

I've already got quotes from a recovery service of between $40 and $1600,  depending on what they find.  My luck is they'll come back with the $1600 price tag.  I guess I could justify it as I have about the equivalent of $4000 in music on it.  It's the 1.8 terrabytes of Mod work that I currently can't access that guts me.  

I was hoping someone might have a suggestion I hadn't thought of before I had to swallow that pill first.

Noted: I have a cloud backup of everything currently accessible now.  Problem was,  I moved to using this backup as my main drive for a lot of stuff as I ran out of room on my internal HD,  and didn't have than a backup to the backup.  Learn the hard way i guess.

Well, from what you wrote I suppose that it is HDD electronics that has gone.

In that case you can only hope that final figure from specialized company will be closer to $40...

I had almost same thing few months ago. I started my PC and my HDD with software installs wasn't there. Luckilly for me I hav all that stuff on my other PC so I wasn't worried but I did tried to open PC case and unplug and plug back that HDD. It was almost same as in your case, I heard some clicks from HDD (not the windows plug n play bong sound though) but PC couldn't see it.

you can always try to buy a similar drive and swap the electronics