Disk drive recovery options

[thewanderer]

I posted this on DAM, but it seems to be a lightly read forum, so i thought i would duplicate it here as there seems to be more activit]


The situation,, i have one of those small ext drives that runs off of computer power via USB. i think its some sort of Western Digital or WD something or other, about as big as a wallet.

anyway, i plugged it in yesterday to the computer and all that i got was the little light on the unit blinking.. i could hear stuff gong on as if it was powered, but no recognition by the computer.

Took to Best buy today to see if they had a recovery option.. they wanted a deposit of 250.  and basically nothing other than we will get the data but no guarantee of anteing other than you will spend AT least 250.

Does anyone have experience with other legit drive recovery companies...i don't know the extent of dmg, if any, computer just won't recognize,

Mac system.

Any thoughts, recommendation or prior experience would be sincerely appreciated

Sincerely

Kim

[aduke]

When this happened to me, it turned out to be the USB cable.

alan

[wolfnowl]

Checking/replacing the cable would be an excellent first step.  It IS possible to disassemble and glean the data from a damaged drive, but doing so must be done in a cleanroom environment.  Costs usually start at around $2K.  It depends on who much the data on the drive is worth to you.

Mike.

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

Sometimes it may also depend on the USB port. USB drives generally exceed load specifications on USB ports but almost all USB ports have some "excess juice". At work I found that USB disks work notepads and desktops but not our HP servers. So you could try another computer. There used to be dual USB cables where you have an extra power cable.

Checking USB cables is a good idea. But disks do crash. Recovery is almost always possible, but it is expensive.

Best regards
Erik

I posted this on DAM, but it seems to be a lightly read forum, so i thought i would duplicate it here as there seems to be more activit]


The situation,, i have one of those small ext drives that runs off of computer power via USB. i think its some sort of Western Digital or WD something or other, about as big as a wallet.

anyway, i plugged it in yesterday to the computer and all that i got was the little light on the unit blinking.. i could hear stuff gong on as if it was powered, but no recognition by the computer.

Took to Best buy today to see if they had a recovery option.. they wanted a deposit of 250.  and basically nothing other than we will get the data but no guarantee of anteing other than you will spend AT least 250.

Does anyone have experience with other legit drive recovery companies...i don't know the extent of dmg, if any, computer just won't recognize,

Mac system.

Any thoughts, recommendation or prior experience would be sincerely appreciated

Sincerely

Kim

[nairb]

I've had success just yesterday recovering files from a friends failed laptop drive. His 4 yr old daughter dropped a toy onto it from the top of a staircase while he was working on the computer. It was windows 7 I believe, and it just wouldn't do anything when he'd try turning it on. You could hear and feel it spinning, but that was it. I'll have to double check but I think a local computer shop looked at it and said it wasn't recoverable. So he got an ssd and moved on.

I first tried a utility called Photorec / Testdisk which kind of runs through a command prompt in my Windows 7 (though it easily just instructs you to navigate choices using arrow keys and the enter key) and it only recognized it as being 100mb with 4 other sections/partitions as unreadable even though its a 200gb drive. I tried a few different things with that as I'm not that experienced with it (though I have been able to use it to recover video/photo files from formatted SD cards). I gave up for a couple hours, but then decided to try again later as I recalled I had also recovered things in the past from a Linux live cd.

So I downloaded the latest Ubuntu Linux, burnt the disk image and booted up the live version (which just operates from your ram) and when I plugged in the drive via a USB adapter, voila! It could read most of the files! Out of 20gb worth of photos, home videos, and music files, there were 3 videos that were corrupted, and maybe a dozen each of the photos and music as well that couldn't be read.

So perhaps you want to give those a try. They're both pretty easy to figure out.

I had eventually turned to Linux as I read that Photorec is often an included program with the installation/live cd, but also because I had once used it in the past just as I had this time to recover my own files from a failed windows NTFS boot drive, by simply using the file browser utility in Ubuntu.

[Rhossydd]

There are several reasons the external drive might not work without the hard disk itself being the problem.

My first suggestion would be to remove the drive from the enclosure and try it in a separate docking station eg http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-external/harddriveenclosures/6619us3.html

That will eliminate the USB cable and any power supply issues in one go.

If the disk spins up without making hideous noises and your Mac still won't see it, get a friend with a PC to follow Nairb's advice and try to recover the data with a Linux live CD. I've managed to recover 'unreadable' drives like this using Linux.
If that doesn't work and data is so important it has to be recovered, it's going to be expensive.

[nairb]

Yes, I got a little ahead of myself.

I used one of these adapters to access the drive outside of a housing:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812156102

and this looks like the same thing:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002

[RobSaecker]

Have you tried using Disc Utility?

[John.Murray]

Put the drive (in the enclosure) up to your ear, then plug it in to power it up.  You should here the drive spin up, and initialize (you'l hear the drive head self calibrate across the surface and them move to the "center" of the platter).  If it continues this self calibration - you probably have a bad drive.  Otherwise, you probably have a bad usb controller - in that case remove the drive from the enclosure, and connect it directly to your mainboard using a standard SATA and PS cable ....

[Steve House]

Have a WD Passport drive with about 250GB of data on it similar to yours that suddenly 'lost' its formatting a couple of months ago.  When plugged it to the computer Windows recognized the drive existed but it couldn't read anything of it and said it needed to be formatted before use.  Purchased a copy of PerfectFileRecovery from Raxco Software and it was able to recover everything on the disk.  A couple of folder names were truncated but other than that it recovered everything.  Took about 72 hours to fully recover all the files.