External Hard Drive Problem

K Byrne

I bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200 external hard drive about a year ago, it has worked fine up till today, I was tidying up audio cables at the back of my tower unit from the sound card and one had looped around the hard drive cable, the hard drive was pulled down and hit the floor

Then minutes after I turned on the computer, only to have it stall at "windows is starting up" for 15+ mins. So I tried rebooting and the same happened again, so then I turned off the hard drive and it loaded up in seconds.

Alot of important files are on the drive, and it would be a serious shame for it all to be gone. And I had only backup up 20% of the files.

I have tried booting in safe mode and the drive letter and icon appears but there is no access beyond that, it just stalls when I try to access it through explorer.

Also when I switched the drive on after the computer itself boots, it brings all applications to a halt. Until I switch it off and everything returns to normal.

The drive itself spins when switched on so it doesn't seem physically damaged

Does anyone have any knowledge of hard drive issues similar to this? Any help is appreciated!

Elmidena

Is there a laptop or something that you could test it on? Most likely the knock corrupted something inside, or maybe even the drivers the computer reads it from. You might be able to install them if you got a disc with them (It's been so long since I bought my seagate external I don't remember if it comes with them) or off the website?
Since it's spinning I don't think it's anything technical, unless it's REALLY loud or sounding in some way different....a sure sign a HDD is about to go dead. I wouldn't fret just yet. There's a program you can get to recover files from a corrupted HDD so don't worry about vitals being lost--could recover all my stuff from a proper cr*pped out HDD in the past. I don't remember the name of the site I got it from, but I'm sure someone here knows what I'm talking about. Good luck though

K Byrne

Yeah I tried to read it on an Acer laptop and a Dell Netbook, both yielding the same results unfortunately. New hardware detected, the disk icon would appear in My Computer, you try access it and it stalls

Thankfully there's no unusual noises. I'm finding it very hard to get any decent support from Seagate or by Googling the symptoms

Elmidena

Does it show up in my computer? Or does the pc freeze for that too? if you can back the stuff up think it'll still be within seagate warranty

KAGY

It could be physically damaged. Don't use it any more before you are ready to recover from it. I just recovered a hdd that had got a knock maybe while writing that destroyed both copies of file tables. I had to use an external enclosure or caddy, then I made a direct copy of it with a Linux command ddrescue onto a larger drive. Then I used recovery software to recover the files. The were unnamed and unorganized because that's the info the MFT records.

K Byrne

Sunshine! wrote: »

Does it show up in my computer? Or does the pc freeze for that too? if you can back the stuff up think it'll still be within seagate warranty

Nope, My Computer freezes up as well and no drive letter or icon appears in normal boot mode.

What recovery software would you recommend?

K Byrne

Update: I just tried the harddrive on a windows 7 desktop and it got as far as recognising the drive, however no files were on it after many attempts to gain access to it. And it freezes similarly as well. Also a dialogue box opened to tell me it needs to be formatted!

yoyo

K Byrne wrote: »

Update: I just tried the harddrive on a windows 7 desktop and it got as far as recognising the drive, however no files were on it after many attempts to gain access to it. And it freezes similarly as well. Also a dialogue box opened to tell me it needs to be formatted!

Try not boot from the drive too often, if the data is more valuable than the warranty you can try recover the drive by prying the casing open carefully, removing the drive and putting it in a computer as another drive, if it recognises then try using something like Recuva to recover files from the dodgy one to the working one, obviously there is no guarantee this will work, the hard drive did receive physical damage from the fall after all!

Hope this helps

Nick

K Byrne

Opening it carefully may be a problem as the flathead hex screws are impossible to get open without the right sized screwdriver. Or do you just mean the outer shell casing?

Would it be possible for a computer compatible with Serial ATA to read it directly as an internal HDD, bypassing the USB power/data chip attached to the front? The instructions are there but is there any chance it might be readable bypassing the USB?

bonzodog2

It is possible, a friend of mine dropped an external drive off a chair, I got him a new enclosure off ebay and it is working to this day. If you have a PC with SATA its worth a try, other wise try a new enclosure or adapter cable.

yoyo

K Byrne wrote: »

Opening it carefully may be a problem as the flathead hex screws are impossible to get open without the right sized screwdriver. Or do you just mean the outer shell casing?

Would it be possible for a computer compatible with Serial ATA to read it directly as an internal HDD, bypassing the USB power/data chip attached to the front? The instructions are there but is there any chance it might be readable bypassing the USB?

The outer casing obviously, not a good idea to open the drive itself!

Nick

K Byrne

I tried the USB power/data chip from the Seagate drive on a smaller old Acer 120gig SATA laptop drive that I salvaged a while back and that drive works fine plugged into it, so that rules out the USB power/data chip

I got full accessibility with the smaller drive, and gained myself some backup storage along with it! So its definitely the drive itself that's causing the problem anyway.

Thanks for the help so far folks!

I'll try and find a mates computer with SATA compatibility to see if it can read it next

danger_mouse_tm

i would take the hard drive out of the external casing and put it into a desktop as the primary drive. Boot up off a spinrite disc and run level 2 data recovery mode. When that completes ( can take 6 minutes to 6 months!) boot up off a linux CD and run live. Put another USB disc onto the pc and start copying as much data as you can. You may have to go directory by directory as one bad file will halt the whole copy process.

KAGY

danger_mouse_tm wrote: »

i would take the hard drive out of the external casing and put it into a desktop as the primary drive. Boot up off a spinrite disc and run level 2 data recovery mode. When that completes ( can take 6 minutes to 6 months!) boot up off a linux CD and run live. Put another USB disc onto the pc and start copying as much data as you can. You may have to go directory by directory as one bad file will halt the whole copy process.

I would try to do a direct disk copy to dump an image of the faulty disk onto a large disk using (GNU) ddrescue. The reason for this is that if there is a little chip bouncing around in there it's just doing more damage everytime it spins up. All the recovery tools should be able to read the image as if it was a hard disk and not risk damaging the hard drive more.
http://www.debianadmin.com/recover-data-from-a-dead-hard-drive-using-ddrescue.html
www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk is a tool I used to recover info, I think they have a walkthrough on site;

For a live Linux CD with the rescue tools on it, including ddrescue and Test Disk, you can try www.sysresccd.org/

Also have a look here http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Tools:Data_Recovery

KAGY

K Byrne wrote: »

Update: I just tried the harddrive on a windows 7 desktop and it got as far as recognising the drive, however no files were on it after many attempts to gain access to it. And it freezes similarly as well. Also a dialogue box opened to tell me it needs to be formatted!

This generally means that it can read the file table. Obviously *Don't* format it! Chances are that you will be able to retrieve your files with a process known as data carving (a program checks each file for a typical structure or heading), but they mightn't be in folders or even named!

PS. just so we know what level to pitch help at, how would you consider your level of expertise? I'm no expert, and don't work in IT, and all the info I'm giving you is due to a successful rescue I did over the summer with the help of Google.

K Byrne

KAGY wrote: »

PS. just so we know what level to pitch help at, how would you consider your level of expertise? I'm no expert, and don't work in IT, and all the info I'm giving you is due to a successful rescue I did over the summer with the help of Google.

Yeah, I'd be similar enough, I wouldn't call myself an expert either, nor do I work in I.T but I am familiar enough with computers. Although critical harddrive failures are new to me so I may seem a little inexperienced talking about them. Hardware knowledge is a more recent venture for me haha