Is the hard drive in an external same as regular internal?

breadbin

my external seagate freeagent drive died on me yesterday so I took it apart and took the drive out. removed the chassis and usb thing and thought it would work like a normal sata hd in my PC but the bios doesn't recognise it.

is it screwed? and if it wasn't f***ed would it work in the PC like a normal one? i thought seagate were a good brand but this didn't last 12 months:(

I voided the warranty cos they're only 80-90 quid and the data was much more important so i tried to get that instead of sending it back and getting a new one.

is there any tricks i can do to access it?

uberpixie

breadbin wrote: »

my external seagate freeagent drive died on me yesterday so I took it apart and took the drive out. removed the chassis and usb thing and thought it would work like a normal sata hd in my PC but the bios doesn't recognise it.

is it screwed? and if it wasn't f***ed would it work in the PC like a normal one? i thought seagate were a good brand but this didn't last 12 months:(

I voided the warranty cos they're only 80-90 quid and the data was much more important so i tried to get that instead of sending it back and getting a new one.

is there any tricks i can do to access it?

if the bios does not recognise it: chances are it's dead as a dodo.

A 3.5" external harddrive is simply a harddrive with a USB to sata/ide bridge and an external power supply: so it should be able to detect in the bios and function as a normal harddrive when you hook it up internally. (as you correctly thought)

Did the harddrive make clicking noisess before it died? An old trick is to pop the harddrive in a plastic bag with a small pouch of silica gel(to absorb condensation) into a freezer for 15mins, then use as normal in your pc.

This may bring the harddrive back to life for 10-20 mins. (freezing causes the platers inside the harddrive that store the data to contract) You can repeat this a few times in a row to try get some data off.

Otherwise you are looking at a professional data recovery company which willcost at least a couple of hundred euro.

Hindsight being a bitch and all: never rely on one hard drive only for important backups, have 2-3 backups and the extremely critical stuff backed up to DVDs and flash disks as well.:(

breadbin

i thought it was dead and luckilly enough there is nothing important lost, i had backups of most important stuff. but i ripped my dvd collection and converted them to avi so lots of man hours down the drain:(

I did read about the freezing but it didn't make any clicking noises or anything like that. I did notice a few delayed write errors now and again but took no heed.

i also read it is most likely the circuitry on the disk itself that is damaged so if I can get a similar hd i can swap the circuit board just to ge tthe films off and then put it back and voila. I might have a look but the thought of buying another one of these is crazy. i'll see how cheap i can get one for. thanks for the suggestion of the freezer, i heard it was a couple of hours to leave it in! lol