Has My external drive Failed?

[ralerin]

I purchased a Rock Mobile disk external drive, 500 gigs (don't remember the model number off the top of my head) in December. It worked fine until day before yesterday, when the drive suddenly decided to drop as I was trying to move files to it. Windows no longer recognizes it, Mac OS doesn't recognize it. The drive itself was hot to the touch before it failed, so I turned it off and tried to turn it on again. The light on the drive stays red and it makes clicking noises (probably the head is stuck and it might be dead).

Question is-is it truly dead? If it isn't, is there any way to recover the information? Please tell me yes and how to do it even if I have to rip the drive apart myself...all the photos of my recently deceased dog are on there, as well as backups of my games. *sigh*

[Broomjockey]

Well, sounds dead. What you'll likely need to do is complicated. I'll outline the basic steps, and someone smarter than me can yay/nay/clarify.

1. You'll need an Ubuntu Live CD, and boot your computer from there, if Windows and OSX aren't recognizing the drive.

2. You'll need to freeze the drive. Overnight in the freezer.

3. Hook up drive to computer which is booted from Live CD.

4. Grab every file as quickly as you can.

[ralerin]

And if the drive's got over 300 gigs worth of stuff? Having it be frozen isn't goign to work too long...

[Broomjockey]

And if the drive's got over 300 gigs worth of stuff? Having it be frozen isn't goign to work too long...

Well, you could do what my friend did. Couple of ziplock bags, suspend drive in pitcher of water, freeze pitcher with drive's cables sticking out top. That, or you'll have to prioritize.

[wolfie]

I've seen a lot of external USB cases (add your own EIDE hard drive), so there's the possibility that your external drive is rigged this way. If it is, the failure might be in the USB to EIDE converter circuit - considering you've got irreplaceable data on the drive, it might be worth it to get an external USB case and transfer the actual drive to this (substitute a new converter circuit).

As for the freezer trick and needing to act quickly, your header info says you're in NH. If you wait a few months, you'll have access to a "walk-in" freezer. Move the computer in there temporarily (for purposes of data recovery), and you won't have to worry about external heat warming up the drive while you're recovering data.

[Chromatix]

Another worthwhile trick is to use rsync instead of cp. This means you can re-freeze the drive if necessary and carry on, and it'll skip over the files already copied.

[ApolloSZ]

I've seen a lot of external USB cases (add your own EIDE hard drive), so there's the possibility that your external drive is rigged this way. If it is, the failure might be in the USB to EIDE converter circuit - considering you've got irreplaceable data on the drive, it might be worth it to get an external USB case and transfer the actual drive to this (substitute a new converter circuit).

As for the freezer trick and needing to act quickly, your header info says you're in NH. If you wait a few months, you'll have access to a "walk-in" freezer. Move the computer in there temporarily (for purposes of data recovery), and you won't have to worry about external heat warming up the drive while you're recovering data.

On that note, if your confident enough and feel safe doing so, is to take the drive out of the case, and try mounting it as a slave drive in your PC itself (dependant on space, connectors etc) as this will remove the converter board from the occasion and save you buying another enclosure.

Make sure if you do this to watch for the heat and stop straight away if you feel it heating up, as then its the drive and the freezing methods will be needed.