Dead external hard drive?

[Jeff Smith]

I need a little help. My 320 gig hd is having issues all of a sudden. When I connect it, I get the "new hardware found" wizard and wants me to install the drivers. I go through the motions & get the "problem occured with software installation" bit... In device manager I show a USB device with a yellow (?) over it but it does'nt seem to recognize the HD. I have never had this problem and used this drive for about a year & I have most of my photos & videos on it. It's a Western Digital mybook. I have tried this on both my laptop and my pc at home. Both are HP's and both are running xp. Any advice for a computer illiterate? Thanks in advance!

 

[Dan Robinson]

Try uninstalling the drivers, then using the CD to do a fresh install.

If the drive enclosure hardware is bad, the drive inside may still work. You just have to open the case, remove the drive and plug it into one of your PC's internal SATA ports. I had a 500GB Seagate enclosure go bad, but the drive worked fine after I installed it internally in the PC.

 

[David Poch]

When you plug it in and power it up can you hear the drive spin? If you can hear it spin and it sounds normal it my not be the drive, it could be the controller card in the case went bad and not the drive. Is it a 3.5" drive? If so you may be able to take the drive out of the case and put it in your desktop to get your data off of it.

One thing you could try is plug it in and get the question mark for the device, delete the device with the ? and reboot with it plugged in. I am thinking it's more of a hardware issue though since the same thing happens on two different PC's.

 

[Jeff Smith]

Ok I'll try removing it tonight & plugging it in to my PC--anything I need to know before crashing my PC concerning this? Or should it be "plug and play"?

The drive didn't have a cd that I can remember....

Yes, it does spin up and i don't hear the "clicks of death" that usually accompany a dead drive. I did notice while it was connected earlier today, the unit seemed to get abnormally warm on top of the case...

Yes, it is a 3.5" drive...

Thanks for the help...

 

[David Wolfson]

The very first thing I'd do is pull out my Ubuntu Linux bootable CD, boot Linux, and see if the drive mounts. If it does then copy the stuff onto another drive right away before dealing with other possibilities. A running Mac OS or Linux computer should also work for trying this.

 

[John Erwin]

This might highlight an earlier point I made regarding the reliability of these units, and not depending on them for your sole means of backing up. I've seen several fail in my workplace, and although I find them convenient I always backup to DVD as well for extra insurance.

 

[cedwards]

I back up all my pictures and video on two external drives. I did do this on DVDs making two copies of each, but the failure rate of the DVDs is high. I have had over half of the DVD's loose data. I have had one older external ND fail. Not the way yours apparently has. Mine just messed up several of the video files. now I can't read them or delete them. That drive has been destroyed and put in the trash after backing up what I could off of it.

 

[Daniel Barker]

If all else fails there are DATA recovery centers.

 

[Mark Blue]

If all else fails there are DATA recovery centers.

Speaking of data recovery companies, last summer I had a RAID 0 array fail on me. I e-mailed a couple of the companies I found by Googling "data recovery" and they quoted me some ridiculous amount like $3,000.00. I never responded so about a week later their rep sent me a followup message to see if they could help. I was like "I would love to have you help, but 3K is a little bit out of my league Biff"!!

 

[Dan Robinson]

Speaking of data recovery companies, last summer I had a RAID 0 array fail on me. I e-mailed a couple of the companies I found by Googling "data recovery" and they quoted me some ridiculous amount like $3,000.00. I never responded so about a week later their rep sent me a followup message to see if they could help. I was like "I would love to have you help, but 3K is a little bit out of my league Biff"!!

It depends on the data - if I wasn't a backup freak (backups are the cheapest insurance against data loss), and I lost a drive with all of my chase video/photos on it, I'd probably find a way to get the funds to pay for recovery even if it was in the thousands of dollars range. It would be a bargain compared to re-shooting everything!

 

[Mike Deep]

RAID 0 = Please fail and take all of my data with you.

Ok I'll try removing it tonight & plugging it in to my PC--anything I need to know before crashing my PC concerning this? Or should it be "plug and play"

With SATA, just plug in the data and power cables and go. You might have to make sure the boot order in the BIOS is correct so the system doesn't try to boot off the transplanted drive, which doesn't have any OS installed. The SATA ports on the motherboard should be labeled so you can tell which is which in the boot order (Unless the manufacturer was drunk like mine, in which case there's no correlation, even though the labels are there).

 

[Earl Faubion]

It's a Western Digital mybook.

Not that this helps Jeff, but I've had horribly bad luck with Western Digital drives, so much so that I will never use another unless it's free, and even then I wouldn't trust it. A few months ago I found what looked like a good deal on an external HD but as soon as I saw it was a Western Digital it was no sale. Instead I opted for a Seagate with less capacity and so far (knock on wood) it has performed well. The last desktop computer I had built also included a WD hard drive on the original spec sheet. I instructed the salesman to replace it with a slightly more expensive, same capacity Maxtor and have been happy ever since.

Just my 2 cents worth.

 

[Mike Deep]

For what its worth, I don't think there's anything really wrong with either brand. You could have a bad experience with either as hard drives are inherently prone to unpredictable failure. Most sites with user reviews are pock-marked with users who have sworn off one brand or the other based on a bad experience, with no real consensus on the matter other than "hard drives can die." There's no terrific rhyme or reason to hard drive failure, it just happens. The only systemic, predictable hard drive fault in recent memory is Seagate's faulty 7200.12 firmware (It affected every single unit shipped prior to the fix).

That's not to say I don't think people can't have really bad luck with a given brand, but I think it's just that - Luck.

 

[Rob Wadsworth]

Yeah, any external hard drive is prone to more physical impacts and shock forces that cause the pickup head on the disc to be jammed into the very same disc. End result is a hard drive that doesn't want to work anymore. One would think that they could do more about this problem, as data recover from a damaged disc is far more costly than making external drives more shock resistant. Of course, dropping external drives is a sure way for ANY brand to break...

 

[Mike Deep]

The solution is going to be solid state disks, but they've got a long way to go yet...