On 27 Apr 2005 01:18:19 GMT, Muchacho del Tocino <muchacho@tocino.mxx>
wrote:
:>My two-year-old external hard drive has died. Almost everything I've
:>downloaded from the groups over the past two years was on that drive.
:>Some of my faves were on that drive. (Oh, boo-hoo!) Is there any discreet
:>way to recover the data from a non-functioning drive, or should I just
:>get out the hammer and start whacking it to pieces?
[snippered]
Yo MdT --
Don't whack. At least not yet. There's some good advice here already,
and all might *not* be lost.
It's already been said that an external drive is simply a standard
"internal" IDE drive that's mounted in a case with its own power
supply and a USB or Firewire interface. The actual drive inside that
case might be perfectly fine. If so, rescuing it might require a few
tools and a little knowledge of computer guts, but it can be done.
My first approach would be to power it up and listen to it, *very*
closely. You should hear a faint whir as the platters spin up to
speed, and a click or two as the head servos reset themselves to zero.
If you (a) *do* hear such sounds, and not a squeeking or scratching
noise (like a bad bearing), then the drive is most likely mechanically
intact. If you (b) hear nothing at all, don't give up yet. If you hear
(c) some sort of nasty noise from inside, then you might have a
serious prob...
In the case of a or b, the next step is to remove the cover and pull
the drive out of the external case. Then you'd open your main computer
case, (or that of some spare compuker you have laying around), and
hook the drive up to *just* a power cable. It doesn't matter if it's
hanging out of the side, it should just be propped up so it doesn't
move around when it's running.
This is a point, btw, where I have *no* idea whether you've ever been
inside a computer or not. If you have, then this is pretty basic. If
you haven't, then the only diff is that it might seem scary. If you
haven't, be assured that none of this is "rocket science." It just
requires a little guidance, which is available.
Going on... you power up, and you listen for that whir. If you hear
it, the platters are spinning up. (If not, then we get into some of
the "last chance" methods Softee described.
If this one is a yes, then you power down, and you find an unused IDE
connector (i.e., like the 80 conductor ribbon cable that's plugged
into the back of your main internal drive), and you plug it into the
"suspect" drive, and you power up again.
I'll make the rest of this a synopsis, because it's all dependent on
your level of knowledge of computer guts. I don't want to go on for 6
pages telling you things that you already know, but on the other hand,
I wouldn't want to skip over something "assuming" you know about it
when you don't. Feedback from you will determine how we approach it.
Simplifying, what we're doing here is determining whether or not the
drive is mechanically and electrically functioning. If no, it may be
Softee time, or even hammer time. If yes, then we let the computer's
BIOS try to identify it. This might involve some confusion on the part
of the computer, and moving a jumper on the suspect drive, as
required. (If it's jumpered as a "Master," and you hook it up to the
same cable as your existing Master drive, the computer will be
extremely unhappy and refuse to see either of 'em, and it'll try to
make you think you've really phucked it up. Ignore it and turn it off.
Simply unplugging the suspect drive will make it happy again.)
If BIOS identifies it, then you *might* be able to read everything on
it once you've booted into Windoze. If so, then you've proved that the
drive and its contents are intact. If not, there are still ways.
For now, I'll just offer an example, from my own experience. A few
years ago, I had a 30 gig drive "fail." At that time, it was my
biggest drive, and it had about 25 gigs of *very* important stuff on
it, including some killer vids I'd been too lazy to burn to CDs, even
though I *know* better.
As it turned out, the power supply in the computer was failing. The
drive was physically fine. With a new power supply, the drive was
still "dead." BIOS knew what it was, but even DOS said it didn't
exist. The partition table had been destroyed during some rad voltage
fluctuations from the power supply. There was *no* way to access
anything on it. I could "only" repartition it and start over.
HAH!! I spent the best part of a week working with a forensics
recovery proggy called "Lost and Found" (which I'll gladly post if we
get to this point), and I recovered every single byte of everything
that was on the drive. (I even saw, and *could've* recovered, an
amazing amount of stuff that'd been long-since deleted and supposedly
wiped.) Then I repartitioned it, formatted it, and started using it
again. And I'm *still* using it.
There's hope, MdT, but it'll take feedback from you, and some
troubleshooting, to determine what went wrong, how bad it is, and what
approach, if any, can salvage it. And, with little known as of now,
the range can cover anything from fairly simple to hammer time.
I'll help in any way I can. Just lemme know.
Take care, and see ya.
KH NP-b54
"Artificial Intelligence will never be
a match for natural stupidity."
(Stolen)
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