External hard drive problem. Help!

judygarland

If I have dropped my external hard drive from desk height and now it wont work, is there anything I can do to? How do these things work? I have previously done the same thing to another hard drive.

I will be gutted if I can't access the files as I have photos going back 10 years. i do have a back up of these on another external drive but the power connection is playing up and I cant seem to find a company that can supply just this?

Any help gratefully appreciated.

isofa

If it won't spin up, it's highly likely the mechanism is damaged, and you'll be unlikely to gain access to the data.

Some specialist companies can help to extract data, but it's very costly, such as OnTrack.

Search eBay for power suppliers for older drives.

There is a myth (that sometimes works!) if you put the drive in the freeze for a few hours (in a sealed plastic bag), you may be able to get it to function for a few minutes. But if the drive heads had hit the spinning platters, it's dead.

fwor

Was the drive running when you dropped it? If not, it's possible that the hard disk is still viable, as the heads self-park when you turn it off.

It's generally not too hard to remove the hard drives and install them either in a desktop computer or in another hard drive caddy - you can get the empty caddies from places like Ebuyer for around £12 IIRC.

First thing you will need to do though is to find out whether the drives are IDE or SATA - it's easy to tell the difference visually.

judygarland

Thanks for your replies. Yes, it was dropped whilst still working. Im definately going to back up to disc. The problem is I have 18 gig of music and 4 gig of photos!

fwor

That's not tooo much of a problem. Any decent backup program should automatically "span" the backup over several DVDs, compressing the data as it does so.

Admittedly you won't gain a lot of space compressing photos or music, but the lot should easily fit on 4 or 5 DVDs.