Dead External HDs

conjon

Hi All,

Over the course of the years, I've built up a collection of 4 External Harddrives which are all dead. On these drives was back ups of my music collection. I tried all 4 drives again over the weekend, on one the light on the drive came on but wasn't recognised by my pc, and the other 3 didn't even start. Before I throw them out, I was wondering if there was anything I could do to see if I can extract the data from the drives? I have read that I should try and take the drives out of the cases and use some sort of special wire to then connect them to my pc to see if that works. I was wondering if there are any other possible solutions/programmes that I could try?

Thanks in advance,
Conor.

vibe666

you could get yourself a USB to IDE and/or SATA (depending on your needs) cable with power supply and take out each drive from its enclosure and test it, to rule out the enclosures themselves being faulty, rather than the actual disks.

something like these here: http://bit.ly/xyawi7

failing that, you could try connecting them directly to an internal IDE or SATA port (depending on what the drive type is) on a desktop PC and try and see if something like spinrite or some other drive recovery software will be able to get anything off them.

_AVALANCHE_

vibe666 wrote: »

http://bit.ly/xyawi7

vibe666

_AVALANCHE_ wrote: »

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/131/399/fry.PNG?1307468855

sorry but WTF is that supposed to be?

it's a bit.ly link because http://www.ebay.ie/sch/i.html?_nkw=ide+sata+usb+-case+-enclosure&_sacat=0&_dmd=2&_odkw=ide+sata+usb+-+case+-enclosure&_osacat=0&_trksid=p3286.c0.m270.l1313 looks ugly.

do you think i'm a spammer or something?

you think my cunning plan was to register an account in 2003 and post 9,500 times between then and now just so i could catch people out with a dodgy link in 2012? :rolleyes:

_AVALANCHE_

Joke, dude.

Ebay<--->This way?

I know it wouldn't have been spam but I never follow the short links...not worth the (potential) hassle.

conjon

Vibe666 - many thanks. I'm going to try take them apart this weekend and get that connection from there.

Avalanche - leave it out!!

Thanks,
Conor.

vibe666

_AVALANCHE_ wrote: »

Joke, dude.

Ebay<--->This way?

I know it wouldn't have been spam but I never follow the short links...not worth the (potential) hassle.

sorry, i get grumpy late at night.

CreepingDeath

conjon wrote: »

I tried all 4 drives again over the weekend, on one the light on the drive came on but wasn't recognised by my pc, and the other 3 didn't even start.

Did you add them to a spare drive bay in a working PC ?
Are they IDE or SATA ?

When configuring old IDE drives, sometimes you had to set jumpers, to tell the motherboard which one was the master drive and which was the slave drive.
Not sure if that's the case with SATA drives.

If possible, set the jumpers to "master" and connect them to their own IDE cable from the motherboard, rather than stringing it to the existing cable.

Also, ensure that both IDE channels are enabled in the BIOS settings.
Typically they would be though.

But your best bet is a usb to ide, or usb to sata (depending on your drive type) cable which connects to the drives.
But you'd also want it to come with an external power supply to connect to the hard drives power socket.

riclad

sata drive load in reference to the cable, ie put your main os ,eg win 7 on drive 1, cable 1 .The simplest way is if drive is ide ,disconnect your dvd drive,use cable for the old drive.Connect drive to ide cable end,set jumper to master or cs, cable select,ie its the only drive on the secondary ide cable.MAKE sure to UNPLUG the pc Main power cable, from the rear pc power socket ie its not goods enough to simply switch off pc,theres still power going thru the pc motherboard.
WHEN power is unplugged ,connect the power and data cable,ide cable, red stripe goes beside the power socket.
DISCONNECT all CDROM,DVDROM Drives first as they can conflict with ramdom drives, due to jumper settings,etc
ide drive cable,interface is 3.5inch wide ,sata drives are much smaller.
see here

http://www.mikeshardware.com/howtos/howto_connect_ide_hd.html

riclad

AS a last resort put in sealed plastic ziplok or similar bag, leave in freezer ,3 hours, take out connect to pc.
SEE google Hard drive Freezer trick,this is cos certain old components,pcb s work temporarily at low tempetures .IF a drive works copy as much data as you can ,important files first, ie it may never work again ,leave heating off in pc room while acessing the old drive .its well known old hd electronic s randomly come back to life at lower tempetures,ie it s no gaurantee ,it MIGHT work .

conjon

Guys,

Firstly, thanks very much for taking the time out to respond, and my delay in getting back to you. I think the first step for me is to try and take the HDs out of the cases, and I made no progress on this over the w/end, due to a sick wife!

Just to address the responses in order:

CreepingDeath - I've no idea if the drives are IDE or Sata. 3 of the 4 drives are old Seagate ones, so I won't know this until I take them apart. I had a look at the drives again last night, and I suspect this is going to be a delicate process as they don't have screws. So I'll have to get a knife/screw driver at them. Could you explain to me what you meant by: Did you add them to a spare drive bay in a working PC ? I simply plugged them into my laptop. Do I need to add them and is this a difficult process?

To be honest, I'm a non technie, so the rest of your response didn't make sense until I saw Riclads response. :-)

Riclad - thanks very much for that link, that will be useful when i finally get the HDs out of their cases. I did read about that freezing trick and might try that as well.

The only reason I want to do this before I bin the drives is to get my music from them, which took a long time to build up. I reckon there's the guts of over 5000 tracks on those drives that I'd like to get back.

I will keep you posted once I manage to get the external cases off!

Thanks again,
Conor.

vibe666

conjon wrote: »

CreepingDeath - I've no idea if the drives are IDE or Sata. 3 of the 4 drives are old Seagate ones, so I won't know this until I take them apart. I had a look at the drives again last night, and I suspect this is going to be a delicate process as they don't have screws. So I'll have to get a knife/screw driver at them. Could you explain to me what you meant by: Did you add them to a spare drive bay in a working PC ? I simply plugged them into my laptop. Do I need to add them and is this a difficult process?

you might well find that there are screws hidden under the rubber feet on the drives, as this is sometimes done to keep the drive looking tidy. you can usually pry them off with a flat screwdriver or knife (mind your fingers! ).

IDE drives are the older type of connection (the bottom drive in the image) and sata is the more modern one (on top).

some drives made around the time of the switch to sata may have both connections, if this is the case then either will work but sata should be quicker and you won't need to mess with any jumpers on the drive.



i believe CreepingDeath was asking if you had tried connecting a bare drive (i.e. without the USB enclosure) to an internal IDE or SATA port on a desktop PC, but it doesn't sound like you have one to test with?

you could buy a SATA/IDE to USB adapter (as shown in my first post), but a lot of recovery tools will work best with a direct SATA or IDE connection from the motherboard of a desktop PC and might not play nice with a USB connection.

also, if the drives are actually dead, it might be a waste of money buying one if you aren't likely to use it in the future.

_AVALANCHE_

vibe666 wrote: »

http://bit.ly/xyawi7

http://www.unshorten.it/

Tells ya where it leads, handy eh?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unshortenit/

vibe666

_AVALANCHE_ wrote: »

http://www.unshorten.it/

Tells ya where it leads, handy eh?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unshortenit/

looking at the URL, i'm wondering does it only work on links? :pac: