External Hard Drive Died

googler

...but they should.

Richie-from-the-Boro

googler wrote: »

...but they should.

No they should not, stop frightening the children with fables / ghost stories.

20 year old rubbish, put about by people like me, to make people like you, pay people like me .. .. .. loads~a~dosh

weegie.geek

Best to err on the side of caution, no? And 20 years ago your shellsuit would've been a static factory.

Randini3333

You say it sounds like it’s spinning? That’s really good news. As people before have said – it suggests the problem is with the case and not the hard drive.

An external hard drive enclosure can be bought for less than twenty quid. If the gods are smiling on you then you can fix the problem by breaking open the case of your broken drive and installng it into the new enclosure.

You’ll need to know if your hard drive is IDE (usually older than 3 years) or SATA (newer type) to buy the right enclosure. Go to the manufacturer’s web site and search for the model of your unit (it’ll be on the label on the bottom of the case). Or pop into Maplins and sweet talk someone into checking for you if you can’t find the manual.

If you’re not confident about replacing the drive - find a local pc repair shop (or last resort back to pc world) and ask to remove your drive and install it into a new external enclosure. This should be a substantially cheaper job of work than the data recovery charge.

But if it makes a repeated clicking sound as it spins – then that’s bad news, because it might mean the problem is the disk, not the case, and data recovery is your only option. Good luck.