witch Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 A teacher has brought me her hard drive which she dropped onto carpet this morning. Of course it is the ONLY copy of all her planning etc.. When plugged in initially it wasn't recognised. I took the cover off and tapped it lightly. Now the drive is seen and apparently the drivers have been installed, but it doesn't appear on the list and I cannot access it. I shall take it home tonight and hang it off my laptop - but until I can do that is there anything else I can try? The lights flash and it makes a cycling noise when plugged in.
caffrey Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 I usually pull the harddrive from the case if I can and attach direct to a pc - It may be the USB interface is damaged.
witch Posted March 25, 2015 Author Posted March 25, 2015 I usually pull the harddrive from the case if I can and attach direct to a pc - It may be the USB interface is damaged. Yeah, that is what I shall do when I get home but I it seems to be glued together
caffrey Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 Also some manufacturers solder the USB interface to the harddrive (or have a custom interface) I always tell the teacher that I may need to damage the case although I've never seen a glued together one, what make is it ?
Norphy Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 The lights flash and it makes a cycling noise when plugged in. A sort of click, squeak, click, squeak cycle? If so, I don't think there's any hope for it sadly.
rich_tech Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 If you have access to a linux machine, you may want to try and use testdisk and see if that finds the disk (seems linux grabs a disk in a different way to windows and not try to format it if it doesnt recognise it), I have managed to pull a lot of data off a damaged disk for a staff member here using it.
witch Posted March 25, 2015 Author Posted March 25, 2015 (edited) Yeah, a sort of hummmmmmm eeek noise The hard drive is a Western Digital I don't have any linux here. I think I will pass it over to my local techie guy who has a lab and all the clean room stuff that might enable him to get the info off it Edited March 25, 2015 by witch
bald_pig Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 I keep a copy of partedmagic handy for these situations, have recovered plenty of documents with testdisk on there
witch Posted March 25, 2015 Author Posted March 25, 2015 I keep a copy of partedmagic handy for these situations, have recovered plenty of documents with testdisk on there But the computer won't even see the drive so I am not sure that would help?
bald_pig Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 But the computer won't even see the drive so I am not sure that would help? Should have mentioned that it's a linux distro https://partedmagic.com/
Joanne Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 with the linux thing, you can boot into it from the CD and check that way. I once recovered a failed hard drive by doing that.
synaesthesia Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 I swear to that WD drives have a built in "Fail in 2015" system. The amount of external WD's that have come to us in the last couple of months has been absolutely horrific. Mostly they're the Passport drives with the soldered USB connectors.
witch Posted March 25, 2015 Author Posted March 25, 2015 I swear to that WD drives have a built in "Fail in 2015" system. The amount of external WD's that have come to us in the last couple of months has been absolutely horrific. Mostly they're the Passport drives with the soldered USB connectors. I think that is indeed one of those. I was surprised as she only dropped it around 3ft onto carpet and it wasn't plugged in
witch Posted March 25, 2015 Author Posted March 25, 2015 drop it again... YOU NEVER KNOW! Well I haven't dropped it but initially it wouldn't even light up until I tapped it a few times...
rich_tech Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 Thats why I avoid WD drives like the plague myself, I have never had a drive with them last more than 2/3 years before I have to RMA it back to them for some reason or another (2 have gotten errors on plattens and one stone cold died and wouldn't power up). I have a "Re-Certified" drive in my windows box at the moment which replaced the 1TB one I sent back to them, I can't rely on it to do anything other than secondary backup of my backups and even then most of my files are already in the cloud these days, its just game installations mostly, though even thats waning.
witch Posted March 25, 2015 Author Posted March 25, 2015 Thats why I avoid WD drives like the plague myself, I have never had a drive with them last more than 2/3 years before I have to RMA it back to them for some reason or another (2 have gotten errors on plattens and one stone cold died and wouldn't power up). I have a "Re-Certified" drive in my windows box at the moment which replaced the 1TB one I sent back to them, I can't rely on it to do anything other than secondary backup of my backups and even then most of my files are already in the cloud these days, its just game installations mostly, though even thats waning. ...and this helps me how, exactly Don't worry - I've just had an email from her asking for the HD back as her dad who "works in IT" might be able to sort it out over the weekend. Really?
elsiegee40 Posted March 25, 2015 Posted March 25, 2015 ...and this helps me how, exactly Don't worry - I've just had an email from her asking for the HD back as her dad who "works in IT" might be able to sort it out over the weekend. Really? Probably going to pay a vast sum of money to a data recovery firm for her
Oddbod Posted March 26, 2015 Posted March 26, 2015 He'll probably do more damage than good… try using DiskRescue from ProSoft engineering. I've used it in the past to recover all sorts of drives from raids to ssds. Western digital drives are to be avoided if at all possible! However they do seem to keep me in work, having recovered over £10m worth of data from WD over the last few years… http://www.prosofteng.com/
witch Posted March 26, 2015 Author Posted March 26, 2015 Thanks all I'm not going to pay out for disk recovery software myself and I have already given the disk to a local company to have a go at - we shall see. There isn't anything else I could have done, is there? I am a bit bothered that her dad will find something that I didn't and make me look a right berk
Norphy Posted March 26, 2015 Posted March 26, 2015 No, I don't think so. If the drive is squeaking it's most likely buggered and can't be revived with conventional weaponry. In those circumstances, I usually tell the user that I'm very sorry but there's nothing I can do and give them the lecture about how stupid it is to have all of your data in one place.
witch Posted March 26, 2015 Author Posted March 26, 2015 Lecture has been delivered to a very contrite and sad 24 year old! My techie guy confirmed my diagnosis which is good, but not good if you see what I mean
mac_shinobi Posted March 26, 2015 Posted March 26, 2015 I swear to that WD drives have a built in "Fail in 2015" system. The amount of external WD's that have come to us in the last couple of months has been absolutely horrific. Mostly they're the Passport drives with the soldered USB connectors. WD = What Data ?
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