I think my external harddrive just died...

popecatapetal

It's a Toshiba 1Tb StorE alu 3.5", whatever all that means. All I know is that I'd only had it about 5 months, and I was really gentle with it - my last one broke after it fell about 4 inches, so I was trying to be really careful with this one... Anyway, I just had it plugged in and was downloading stuff to it, when all of a sudden the little blue light shifts to red and my download stops with an error message...

I tried unplugging it, restarting it, all the stuff that I, a not-particularly-techonlogically-gifted person, know how to do. It didn't work. At the moment, it stays blue right up to the point where I plug the usb into the computer, then it shifts back to red again. Earlier, it was red with occasional flashes of blue while it was plugged in, and the icon in my computer just said 'local disc E:', instead of the name of the harddrive, and whenever I tried to open it, it asked if I wanted to reformat it.

I had about 700 gigs of video and music on it - is there any chance that it can be retrieved? I phoned komplett, who I got it from, but they couldn't help over the phone - they just said to send it in and they'd try to repair it, but it'd take a few weeks.

Anybody experienced this before, or know what might have happened to it?

R3al

It sounds like the usb interface that has gone in the external drive rather than the disk itself, what was the error message that you received?

You can buy a hard disk enclosure and then take the hard disk out of the broken external drive and put it in the enclosure to access the data, bear in mind that if you do this you will be invalidating your warranty.

If you send it back to the manufacturer there is a chance they may wipe your data.

Your other option is to send it to a data recovery specialist, but this is generally expensive

CrinkElite

R3al wrote: »

It sounds like the usb interface that has gone in the external drive rather than the disk itself, what was the error message that you received?

You can buy a hard disk enclosure and then take the hard disk out of the broken external drive and put it in the enclosure to access the data, bear in mind that if you do this you will be invalidating your warranty.

If you send it back to the manufacturer there is a chance they may wipe your data.

Your other option is to send it to a data recovery specialist, but this is generally expensive

or you could just take it out of the enclosure and install it directly into the machine.
you may have to tear away some protective shielding and you will definitely need a spare sata or ide cable but you do not need to buy an enclosure

R3al

CrinkElite wrote: »

or you could just take it out of the enclosure and install it directly into the machine.
you may have to tear away some protective shielding and you will definitely need a spare sata or ide cable but you do not need to buy an enclosure

If you do it this way you will need to slave the disk off your current hdd as the disk in the external drive will have no operating system, you can get an enclosure for less than 20 euro and it means you will still have an external drive which I imagine is what you would prefer rather than having a second disk in your PC as this is why you bought an external drive in the first place

CrinkElite

fair enough, I'm an impatient cheapskate so that's just what I'd do if I wanted to try and retrieve the data without spending any money.

Either or it depends on your priorities

R3al

popecatapetal

Both of the methods advised are valid and will achieve the result that you are looking for