Dead Hard Drive

[Eagle101]

Hey everyone, I hope you all are enjoying your summer!

I found my 1~2 year old My Book whilst cleaning my room and i remembered it being broken somewhat. I removed the case of the hard drive and now its completely naked as an internal hard drive, i connected it to my PC and it is detected in the device manager although not showing up in my computer and disk management.

I also cant hear anything spinning in there only the first several seconds when i connect the drive. Below is a pic hope it illustrates.



http://img801.imageshack.us/i/deadhdd.png/][IMG]http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/2548/deadhdd.png

[[Expletive Deleted]]

Re: Dead Hard Drive

I had the exact same thing happen to a My Book a couple of years ago. I just don't buy their crap anymore. First the USB adapter in the case quit, so I turned it into an internal drive. It worked long enough for me to get most of my data off and never worked again. Garbage.

[Eagle101]

Re: Dead Hard Drive

Ouch man i always thought WD ext drives were good. Thanks for the info though much appreciated because i was planning on going to a local electronics store today to purchase another one.

[Vreki]

Re: Dead Hard Drive

I had issues with WD too. I bought two "My Passport Elite" to handle my backup.
The red one worked flawlessly, the black one failed to be recognized most of the time on my Win 7 and half the time on my Vista.
I got it replaced, but the new one didn't work any better, so I ended up buying a Iomega eGo Blackbelt to replace it.

[CptainCrunch]

Re: Dead Hard Drive

Eagle, can you not access it at all? If you cannot, it could be that the read/write heads have failed. The electronics are working, which is why you see it, but the spinning/moving arms are not doing that.

I have found that most external packages are not very reliable. I have seen many fail. More WD than others, but even them. What I have found to be cheaper and more reliable is to make your own. You can buy an external enclosure and a larger internal hard drive cheaper than these external ones. You can pick and chose the drive you want and what the enclosure looks like. Then if the hard drive dies, no worries, you buy another and slap it in the same enclosure.

Crunch

[Eagle101]

Re: Dead Hard Drive

Crunch, that actually sounds a lot better than getting a ext hard drive lmfao as they are expensive as it is. I will definitely give that go thanks for the info all, been much help .

[[Expletive Deleted]]

Re: Dead Hard Drive

Oh, if you still have data that needs to come off of that drive, you could try freezing it. I had to freeze my My Book for it to let me get the data off of it. I put it in a vacuum-sealed bag and stuck it in the freezer overnight. It won't help with all kinds of problems but this drive had a crashing head and freezing helped for a (VERY) short time.

[Eagle101]

Re: Dead Hard Drive

first time i heard that lol freezing a drive ahah mebeh i should put my whole rig int he freezer whilst using it as Bahrain summer is brutal! back on topic though its good that the data i have in that drive is of no importance i have two other back ups! Thanks for the suggestion though

[[Expletive Deleted]]

Re: Dead Hard Drive

http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

I forget where I first heard about it. But it worked for me and it worked for this guy. ^^^

[TheEn|gma]

Re: Dead Hard Drive

Reading this thread makes me worry about my WD My Passport that's already died once :/

[Eagle101]

Re: Dead Hard Drive

Well if it makes u feel any better my my book was tipped over by a friend that's what caused the drive to die.