IT Help needed - PLEASE !!

[Supervox]

Does anyone have or work for a company that has the ability to open up a non-working external Hard Drive and copy the data direct from the disk ?

My 80Gb HD has ceased functioning

Power is getting to the case, but the drive is not 'spinning up' - so I don't know whether it is the actual drive or the circuit board to drive connection.

Unfortunately (for me) this drive has a lot of files (pics of the twins & 10yrs worth of Midi files !!) that I hadn't backed up - bad form I know, but not a lot i can do about it now - other than remeber in future !!

Someone here at work (non-IT bod) has suggested putting the drive in the freezer overnight & then trying it again - seems a bit suspect to me ?!! Don't want to destroy what's on there if there's any chance it can be retrieved.

Cheers guys - hopefully one of you wonderful IT peeps will be able to help

[hindle8907]

You could try taking the drive out of the HDD Caddy and put it directly into the PC ..
If not it would cost you a minium of 200 quid to retrive the data if not more i am afraid.
I can give you the name of the company we use at work if you want.

[hindle8907]

as for the freezer thing WTF lol .

the freezer thing has worked for many, brings the heads closer to the discs, but thats not working for this error lol. Try it in your pc like hindle said.

Ive heard of the freezer trick a few times, it seems that sometimes it works sometimes it doesnt, however it is always a last resort! Normally its used when a drive is starting to fail, not if it has failed already

Sometimes freezing a drive can work, but I think that they need to be spinning up. I had a dodgy hard drive that I packed in ice, which made it work for long enough to back it up.

[flymo]

I've had a couple of these fail over the years (both Toshiba) and in both cases it was the circuit board in the caddy that died. Moving the drive itselt to a PC allowed it to spin up fine.

You can also buy replacement drive caddies from the likes of Maplin.

[fizzwheel]

The other trick I found over the years with drives like that was to give them a good solid thump on the top of the drive.

Quite often it would get the drive spinning again and it would stay up long enough to rescue the data off of it.

I'd only try this as a total last resort though as it might just finish it of as well.

There are specialist data recovery companies that you can use to get the data back off the disk, but they are unfortunately not cheap...

[JamesMio]

Couple of mates of mine run an IT company that specialise in data recovery - they're very good, and I don't think they're that unreasonable price wise. Well worth a bash at least: Ask for either Aynsley or Jason, and tell them James put you onto them.

Kingdom IT Data Recovery

It's fine saying put it in the PC guys, but if Supervox doesn't know how to do that or what kind of cable to buy, or even what HDD connectivity format his PC has, or if he has a laptop, or indeed what kind of drive is inside the external HDD (how old is it?)...

If the external Hard Disk is not working as it is you have very little to loose by opening it up, assuming it's not still under warranty (though warranty would just replace it and that doesn't help you with your data).

See if there are any screws or if you can prise open the case with minimal damage and take the hard disk out itself out. Take a picture of the cable that goes into the hard disk and post it here. We will then point you towards the correct replacement external HDD cage on ebay to try to get it working again. This is the simplest solution, because we don't have to worry about the drive formats available on your PC, or opening up your PC to fit it. It means you have to take a risk on buying the cage then the disk doesn't work, but then you can just flog the cage on ebay again.

If it's a newer drive it's likely to look like this



but if older it may look like this