My external HDD just got pwned.

Andreas

It fell a fair distance and now makes a pretty horrible sound when plugged in. Sounds a lot like the pin is having a great time scratching the disc, which is just brilliant. Gonna have a mate open it up later to have a look; but I am wondering, what are peoples experience of this? Anyone ever tried to get one repaired? How effective is it? I take it it is ridiculously expensive? Its not really a case of just buying a new one, a lot of my stuff is one there, including pretty much the entirity of my portfolio. :poly127:

SinisterUrge

Sorry man, your hard drive is fucked. I had the same thing happen to me, it was an iomega 2.5inch drive. I'm sticking with Lacie and 3.5inch drives from now on. All hard drives are rubbish quality because they are made from dirt cheap labour from the far east. In the future mate, back up your work.

There is a kit my old man has (computer technician) for reading the drive when its in that state.
http://www.scythe-eu.com/products/pc-accessory/kama-connect-2.html

Until you get that kit my advice is not to turn it on, because the scratching is just damaging it further. Get some software like arax disk doctor (http://www.disk-doctor.com/price.htm), well worth $40 and it will recover files for you. There is a 1/4 chance that will work, fingers crossed you could be lucky. I know how you feel, its a nightmare.

If that fails, you can get the disk repaired, buy its only something the likes of banks do. Reason being it costs a small fortune like around $10k or so.

sir-knight

learned my lesson first time my 2.5" mobile drive was dragged off the desk and onto the floor...

there's no saving it if it's crunching away, not that there was much chance saving it if it weren't crunching... the heads plowed into the platters and bent. Data recovery services are expensive and somewhat effective, there's no repairing it. You could try and transplant the platters into an identical drive, that's what most data recovery places would attempt, but this must be done in a complete cleanroom environment.. no dust no nothing.

InProgress

Sucks to hear that, man. Hope you get all your files back and you can use them. But, from now on, back up your files TWICE! One on an external HDD and write them on a DVD which, I doubt you'll use a lot.

pior

Good luck with that mate.

That makes me wonder, hearing SKnight story of a drive falling of a desk.

I have two of these guys, one for art backup one for for media files.
[ame]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001QCAGF0/sr=8-25/qid=1244816384/ref=noref?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1244816384&sr=8-25[/ame]

They are made of metal that will most likely explode into million pieces if they fall from a desk height. Question is, do these guys need cooling at all? If they don't, why not wrapping sensible drives like those inside an uber, one inch width rubber casing or similar. I know it sounds stupid but wouldn't that be great? Nothing safer than that ...

Also. Any solid state drives recommendations? Or is it still to early to switch over?

Andreas

Can I not send it off to a date recovery place? I was googling for a bit there, seems to be places that'll do it for 200 pound or so (I ain't picking up the tab, I didn't do the dropping :P ). Are these places a reasonable solution? Will they be able to save some of it? All my stuff...all of it gone. My music, movies, tutorials, not to mention my whole portfolio. Damn. I guess I learned my lesson. Back up your back up.

Ruz

that sucks . Igot to work on monday and my external drive was deader than flares.
After a near coronary It turned out to be the plug.

Marcus Dublin

You should try using Spinrite before nuking your Harddrive. I had the same problem with one of my externals earlier in the year and it worked like a charm. I was able to get the drive working long enough to move all of the data to my one of my other hardrives. Mind you that I could still use the existing fixed harddrive if I wanted to.

Steve Gibson demonstrates how Spinrite works: [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x_KlRlcqNI[/ame]

You can also purchase the software from here: http://www.grc.com/cs/prepurch.htm It's fairly inexpensive and well worth the money. Once again I highly recommend it!

By the way SpinRite takes it's sweet time to go through and repair your harddrive. Case an point, the drive that went wacky on me was 1TB and it took 2 days for SpinRite to repair. Luckily I had a back up computer so I didn't miss a beat! That said you may want to run the program during your off hours over the weekend or something.

sir-knight

last time I heard someone getting professional data recovery, they were only able to get about 50% of stuff off of it, not worth it when you can consider you could probably redo the work and it'll be better.

pior:

it doesn't matter if it's a high priced lacie drive or a pre packaged seagate or a standard desktop or laptop drive you put in an aftermarket enclosure.

There are only about 5 major harddrive manufacturers in the world, and they ALL won't survive a fall from a desk. Even those lacie drives will probably use a WD or seagate drive.

My mobile drives are now ALWAYS very low to the floor, if not on the floor so they don't get pulled off a desk when I back my chair up.

They do need a certain degree of cooling, but google did an article a few years back saying that they've used regular desktop drives in the thousands, and didn't see any correlation between heat and drive failure, as long as of course the thing remains near operating temperatures. It's not the fall, it's the G load at the stop, so even if you did have the rubber enclosure, it would have to absorb the load and not transfer it into the drive.

Look up those science experiments where kids have to develop a rig to protect an egg dropped off the roof of a building... this is what you need to do :P

Or you can just put your drives on the floor.

dehebo

never had this happen to me, but I do know that data recovery is pretty damn expensive and I hear they can do a really good job, but as you can imagine its very job dependent. Best bet is speaking to someone at a reputable company that does this work. I've got a friend whose company had to do it once, all I know off hand is it worked.

Andreas

Marcus Dublin wrote: »

You should try using Spinrite before nuking your Harddrive. I had the same problem with one of my externals earlier in the year and it worked like a charm. I was able to get the drive working long enough to move all of the data to my one of my other hardrives. Mind you that I could still use the existing fixed harddrive if I wanted to.

Steve Gibson demonstrates how Spinrite works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x_KlRlcqNI

You can also purchase the software from here: http://www.grc.com/cs/prepurch.htm It's fairly inexpensive and well worth the money. Once again I highly recommend it!

But shouldnt I leave it powered off if its making a clunky scratchy noise? I'm really worried its scratching the actual disc...

Marcus Dublin

Blenderhead wrote: »

But shouldnt I leave it powered off if its making a clunky scratchy noise? I'm really worried its scratching the actual disc...

By all accounts yes! That is of course if you’re not using it as your main harddrive.

Turn it back on when and if you decide to use Spinrite and let it work it's magic.