External hard drive not read by comp....help

spunkymunky

Hi guys

Have a wee problem, well huge to me. I was transferring data from my pc to a seagate free agent external H/D. The drive fell about a foot to the ground and now isnt being read by the computer, or any computer. Its is still switched on and buzzing away but just not being read. Ive tried different cables to no avail.
Anybody able to help at all?

Cheers
Sm

seamus

Sounds like it's screwed. Hard Drives are pretty sensitive so if you drop it while the platters and/or heads are in motion there's a good chance of scratching the platters. Once this is done, it's screwed.

Does the machine read it as "unformatted" or can it just not read it at all?

spunkymunky

Not really what i wanted to heat at all!!!
Just doesnt read it all.

tech

hate to break the news most hard drives after a good fall are totally damaged

There is an option to send these off for DATA recover but at a hugh cost

I've Bad news for you. i had the same problem. Mine just crashed one day and asked me did i want to reformat. i said cancell. when i found out the next day it had crashed i tryed to reformat but it wouldn't let me. it was completely gone. sorry man i'd say its over. i lost everything, i know how devastating it is!!

spunkymunky

Hmmm...not sounding good at all. Cant he data be recovered?

tech

Thats Why I aways back up all my critical data, I use RAID 5 and tape backup

Also I have a small external Hdd that I backup my laptop onto

I have over 1 TB in total,

tech

Yes can by cbltech.co.uk

They are free to excess the drive and then you can decide if you want to go ahead with data recovery

spunkymunky

This is the data back up, so maybe all is not lost but i know theres stuff on there that will be needed. Worse part is its not my drive. Was only using it to copy my stuff from desktop to my laptop.

Ill search a few places and see what they come back with. Exactly whats needed in january!!!!

Thanks

legs11

well join the club

i had a seagate free agent pro drive, it stopped working all of a sudden, must have fell over on itself on the carpet. ! bang

busted

lost 400gigs of data, going to return this cnut of a drive to maplin for a refund.

i had an iomega drive which took a battering and never failed me

NEVER but seagate again.

Jeff_32

Folks,
Same thing has happened to me.
Have a maxtor 200GB external HD for nearly 4 years now.
Recently I'm getting an "I/O read device error" when I try to access it from my PC. Unit still powers on and whizzes away and the drive appears on the PC but unable to access it.
Have tried it with both Firewire & USB2 on my PC and a laptop. But no success.
Any ideas?

Would the likes of Maplin or PC World do data recovery?
I don't mind too much if the drive is unfixable but I really want the data.

Thanks,
Jeff

seamus

There's a tiny chance that you've damaged the case electronics and not the hard drive itself. You should be able to remove the hard drive from the case and plug it directly into your machine.

Data recovery takes a lot of time, expensive tools and a good degree of skill. It's not cheap and should really only be reserved for times when the data is actually worth a lot of cash (thousands). If you can live without the data or replace it with a bit of work, you're better off doing that.