Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

[.Gunfire]

Well my ext. took a crap on me after having it for about 8 months.

Does anyone know of any good free recovery software? I'm running kinda tight on money tbqh.

Any help will be thanked.

~Gunfire

[Flt. Sgt. Powderhound]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

Depends what happened. If it's mechanical failure then you're stuffed.

[.Gunfire]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

As in physical?

It still spins, I have not dropped it, and it still lights up.

[Busby, Paul (Bicci)]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

When my external WD Mybook failed a few months ago i had to physically temove the drive from its casing and connect to to the PC as if it was a normal drive. Luckily this worked for me but i cant say the same for you really.

Whats actually happening when you plug it in. Does it recognise the device at all in win, either by the device manager/hard drive manager or my computer?

[[Expletive Deleted]]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

When my external WD Mybook failed a few months ago i had to physically temove the drive from its casing and connect to to the PC as if it was a normal drive.

What, did you cut it out of the plastic? My WD Mybook crapped itself a long time ago, every time I connect it Windows says that it isn't formatted. So I repair the MBR and I'm able to get a few files off of it before it fails again. It doesn't sound any different, it just spins without doing anything... :dead:

[Busby, Paul (Bicci)]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

What, did you cut it out of the plastic? My WD Mybook crapped itself a long time ago, every time I connect it Windows says that it isn't formatted. So I repair the MBR and I'm able to get a few files off of it before it fails again. It doesn't sound any different, it just spins without doing anything... :dead:

Well there wasnt any cutting involved i just took it apart.

It was the controller circuits that went on mine, couldnt get it to be recognised by any computer (mac win linux) using any interface (firewire 400/800 or usb) and i had some important video on there which i needed to get off.

That sounds more like an issue with the actual drive itself tho i must say

[CptainCrunch]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

Yeah, the WD books are having a good failure rate. I have taken a few different ones apart and removing the hard drive and putting it in a system seems to work fine.

Most of the books have two screws on the back and then some tabs that you can pry free. The book then falls apart and you can take it from there

Crunch

[[Expletive Deleted]]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

I'm hoping it works. Mine has a lot of data on it, and since it WAS my backup, a lot of that data is lost to me. It will give me an excuse to use my weird eSATA stuff. My bracket has power and data ports that allow me to use an internal drive externally. I've never tried to use it that way, though.

[CptainCrunch]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

I'm hoping it works. Mine has a lot of data on it, and since it WAS my backup, a lot of that data is lost to me. It will give me an excuse to use my weird eSATA stuff. My bracket has power and data ports that allow me to use an internal drive externally. I've never tried to use it that way, though.

It works great. Thats what I did because these external drives you buy are crap.

I bought an eSATA kit and an internal hard drive with a five year warranty. Everything has been running great and it all cost me about $85 total.

Crunch

[[Expletive Deleted]]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

Well, in my case the drive is hosed.
I got the drive out of the enclosure and hooked it up to my backplate with no issues. While the drive is connected, my computer slows to a crawl. I was able to install TestDisk and copy a few files from the drive, but a lot of the files fail due to I/O errors. I really didn't expect a WD Caviar to fail like that. Oh well, at least I got some of the data from it.
Next I'm going to take a look at the platters just for fun.

But, if you need to recover files from a drive that still spins but is corrupted or otherwise jacked-up, TestDisk is a pretty useful free utility.

[Busby, Paul (Bicci)]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

sorry to hear that mate

[henin12]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

Stellar Information is one of leading data recovery company. I have used Stellar Phoenix Windows data recovery software to recover my lost data.This software demo version is free in which you can see the preview of your recoverable data.

[[MyIS]Dan]

Re: Ext. Hard Drive Recovery.

I found this one good to get my partition back after I nuked it by mistake, and in all honesty it wasn't my fault, got 450GB back. :)

http://www.partition-recovery.com/