apparent hardrive failure
polycounter lvl 14
So I have a freecom 160gig usb hardrive and the past few days has been acting up, eg opening folders extremely slowly locking up entire computer when certian video files are opened(avi) not normally any dvd files (vob).
Today though as soon as I plug in the HD it causes a huge hangup on the pc, starts off with one thing say my computer freezes and eventually takes down everything else, it even can stop the pc from booting up/ shutting down if plugged in. It also doesnt appear in my computer anymore but does in device manager.
Before it went down completely if i was watching a video from it and browsing a folder with pictures the video would begin to fail.
By simply unplugging it though the computer goes back to normal, and all the commands I did when it was plugged in activate.
I didnt want to scrub it as it has over 5 years of things I have collected, tuts, refences, guides, useful videos etc but now I cant even access it.
Anyone any ideas?
Chris
edit: im rocking the xp home look, if thats important.
Today though as soon as I plug in the HD it causes a huge hangup on the pc, starts off with one thing say my computer freezes and eventually takes down everything else, it even can stop the pc from booting up/ shutting down if plugged in. It also doesnt appear in my computer anymore but does in device manager.
Before it went down completely if i was watching a video from it and browsing a folder with pictures the video would begin to fail.
By simply unplugging it though the computer goes back to normal, and all the commands I did when it was plugged in activate.
I didnt want to scrub it as it has over 5 years of things I have collected, tuts, refences, guides, useful videos etc but now I cant even access it.
Anyone any ideas?
Chris
edit: im rocking the xp home look, if thats important.
Replies
I concur with that possibility, I once had a western digital external USB hard drive... it stopped working, so I started taking it apart because that's what I like to do with broken technology, so I open it up and what do I find? a sata drive. I open my case, pop it in and what happens? It works! So, now I have a new internal hard drive. So, I'd try extracting the drive and seeing if it works.
I would also suggest taking it apart if you have no luck. You can also get a gizmo that hooks up the hard drive to a USB directly too to save having to install the hard drive inside the PC.
If you can't get anything still, try a small computer shop. I paid for it to get looked at (only cost me £15) but they couldn't do anything. That's where it gets silly money... I took it to a computer forensics place and they were gonna charge me £600 to retrieve the 500GB and I was gonna pay it but even they couldn't fix it. The heads had gone and when they replaced them, they went straight away again.
The only other piece of advice I was given is a bit dodgy, so I don't take any responsibility for what happens to your drive!
But the forensics guys told me that it might work, but it might ruin the drive too. I was told to wrap the HDD in plastic and put it in the freezer. Apparently it shrinks the bits inside just enough that sometimes it gets it running again. It's only temporary though and when you take it out the freezer you need to get all the info off it straight away as it could just die.
It could be something to do with the usb to sata connection board on the front as the drive has been dropped alot. Because it is a sata drive I can place it directly into the pc but there is only one set of leads which go into my internal drive what would I need to hook up this one?
chris
*edit*: it still hangs up my computer till i take it out but I can see it in my computer and access files/ videos from it, but after 3-4 minutes programs begin to crash and my computer freezes
Going forward you should only get solid state and memory drives, the less moving pieces the better off you'll be.
yes, I've did this a few times back in 2003 - not sure if it works as good with the larger capacity drives that are around now.