External hard drive problems

[befuddled]

ash75
If the drive was encrypted, you'd have to enter a password in order to mount the drive before you could see anything through Windows. Without the password, it will likely appear as a unformatted drive.

It is beginning to sound like a hard drive failure, especially if you hear any odd clicking, buzzing or knocking? Have you tried copying just 1 or few files? And the ones you could see, could you open them? Whatever you do, do not try to write any files to the drive.

You might wish to try an app such as Recover My Drive. Just know that any poking around you do could make the problem worse. The experts all say to make a forensic image of the bad drive, then restore it to a good drive. The point of a forensic copy is that it does not write anything to the drive being copied. Once you have a forensic image and have restored it to a known, good drive. Then you try to recover your files from that drive. You will need to google how to make a forensic copy and what programs will do this. I would imagine any of the drive imaging apps can do this, such as Paragon or Acronis. One more thought: you might be able to mount the image as a drive. This is very similar to mounting an dvd iso image as a drive, if you are familiar with that. Then you could see what you can do on it. You can copy files from the image, if you can access them. Most imaging apps (probably all) let you mount the image as a drive. Another alternative is a drive recovery service, but they are not cheap.

[pharoahegypt]

The lesson to learn from all this, is NOT to pull out the lead while the external hard drive is running. When not in use it does no harm to cut the power in this way, but with the disc spinning while 'working' it is guaranteed to throw a wobbler.

I work with pc's and laptops and have had this several times, but I've found swapping from the caddy to a separate 'serial bridge adaptor'; which you can buy in most good computer supply shops; the drive usually comes back to life.

But I would disagree with the advice given in regard to accessing 'password protected' hard drives. In my experience, unless extra protection has been enacted to the hard drive other than a normal windows password, then simply by using one of these SBA's you can plug it into another laptop and access the data. The only downside is that you will find that as you try to access the user file you will get a warning telling you its protected, but if you close this warning and just wait until the top bar fills completely green, then the folder will usually open of its own accord, and remain free to view for the time its still plugged into the current machine. (as the hdd you're trying to access is your own, you of course would know the password in any case, and be able to enter it if asked)

Again, every hard drive and every machine has its variations, but having worked on most machines in the past few years, I've rarely not been able to access data from a hard drive in this way. Best of luck.

[MOW]

Originally Posted by befuddled

MOW - Sorry to be so slow in answering. My memory is lousy these days. I forgot to look in. Sorry.

Do you know if you encrypted the drive?

It might also be that the OS is, for security reasons, not permitting you access. You should perform all actions for accessing, copying/moving files logged in as an administrator.

lagerlout's suggestion is, in my opinion, the best way to do this sort of thing as it removes the possibility of a universal cable or dock being a weird. I've had one cable work fine on one system, but would not work on the other.

If the drive is not readable, there are several things that could be preventing this: the drive is encrypted, or you don't have permissions, or the cable is quirky or bad, the drive is bad.

It's really tough to troubleshoot like this. I'm sure I could solve it 30 minutes if I had it in my hands, but we'll have to do the best we can this way.

The unit is hooked up to a Newertech Universal Drive Adapter. The drive is not encrypted. I can't recall alot of previous noises coming from the case that last time I downloaded into the EHD. It just quit.

My biggest problem is that the Gateway laptop & the desktop do not recognize the USB connection. A few days ago I tried GetDataBack and got a message that there were no files after 4 hours of scanning on that software. I am going to try a recovery tomorrow with R-Studio software & see what happens.

I am sure someone with more experience could have gotten better progress. I will update with new results tomorrow, hopefully.

[befuddled]

MOW - Sorry to hear you've had no success yet. It's not sounding encouraging, but maybe the other program will find something.

[MOW]

When I could get Get Data Back to be recogonized, I couldn't find any files. Ran Geta Data Back for FAT and had no success. Just tried to run the Seagate File Recovery Tool and it won't recogonize the USB port (that works).

I believe it is a sign the unit is mechanically damaged. I have an IT professional/fellow bar-fly that could possible help, but that is a long shot for just mainstream music, movies, and porn collections/movies. About 1 tb of collections of all kinds.

My days of Seagate are over, though.

[neod]

try run the diagnostics program
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/
to see if the drive is healthy

If you have a desktop computer I would just connect the hard drive directly to the motherboard then boot the diagnostic program from a CD or USB to test it out.


All hard drives will eventually fail, it's just a matter of when they will fail.

[pharoahegypt]

Originally Posted by MOW

and porn collections/movies..

in regard to your fears of having a professional look at this drive for you, trust me, there are very few of us who give a damn as to the contents, its just a paid job or challenge to overcome. we have seen 'everything', and more usually just see the data as data, not a chance to scan some 'dirty' old guy's porn collection...lol. you are only judged on your willingness to pay for a reasonable job performed.

[old alal]

Originally Posted by pharoahegypt

in regard to your fears of having a professional look at this drive for you, trust me, there are very few of us who give a damn as to the contents, its just a paid job or challenge to overcome. we have seen 'everything', and more usually just see the data as data, not a chance to scan some 'dirty' old guy's porn collection...lol. you are only judged on your willingness to pay for a reasonable job performed.

Tell that to Garry Glitter. And I take it you do not work for a certain chain.

[Blue126]

For what its worth to anyone, my advice with external hard drives is you only ever fill them to 3/4 qtrs, never go past that and the drive will be good for a very long time.

Go past that mark and then you will notice the dreaded noise, thats the start or warning of an impending crash, so start the back up then to a new hard drive.

I used to back up to DVD's but over time they get corrupted too and the cheaper and faster way IMHO is external hard drives, just don't overfill and you will be okay.

[a435843]

Originally Posted by Blue126

For what its worth to anyone, my advice with external hard drives is you only ever fill them to 3/4 qtrs, never go past that and the drive will be good for a very long time.

Go past that mark and then you will notice the dreaded noise, thats the start or warning of an impending crash, so start the back up then to a new hard drive.

I used to back up to DVD's but over time they get corrupted too and the cheaper and faster way IMHO is external hard drives, just don't overfill and you will be okay.

This is also true with thumbdrives. While they may not malfunction, they grind to a halt when 80-90% full, because the device is having to rearrange files they were hastily previously spread throughout the drive, in order to create space for new files.

Not being a user of external hard drives for anything other than system images, I didn't know the same was true for these.

As far as DVD's are concerned, however, I couldn't disagree more. Buy a good brand like Maxell and store & handle them properly, and they're fine, and well worth the extra time and effort. With optical media, the disc can be placed in any reader and you can get files off, though, as quoted, a small corruption can cause a problem.

On the other hand, external drives have many points of failure, the connection to USB, the disks themselves, the motor, the controller...any one of those can cause a problem, though swapping out some components is possible. One other thing I've noticed about external hard drives is that they go bad fast. Once you start noticing issues, you have very little time to salvage the data to another drive, where with DVD's, just using another drive can get the data off. Of course, the number one issue with external hard drives is the statistical risk...if a DVD fails, it's 4.5G of data, a more easily replacement amount of data; if an external hard drive fails, it's well over a hundred times that much loss.