USB External HD stuffed

spike7451

Yesterday I was listning to some music I had on my Seagate 2.0 USB External HD (500gig) & when I moved it,it started to beep & the music froze.
Googling it,it seems to be a common problem with Seagate drives,so I removed it from the caddy it was in,put it in the caddy for the other drive & connected it,same thing,it beeps for a couple minutes,then I get the 'thunk' noise you get when you connect a drive to the PC & the plug icon,but no drive showing in COMPUTER.
The drive itself is quiet & you cant feel the vibration from the thing spinning.
I've 500gig of data I backed up onto there as well as music,video clips & photo's
I realise that it's knackered but I'd like to recover the data from the drive onto a new (non seagate) drive.I used a programme before to recover data from my laptops old HD when that failed but the free limit for that is 1gig. (Power Data Recovery)
I'm also going to replace the working Seagate one with a seperatly powered HD.

Does anyone know of a good programme to recover the data from the disc?...And can anyone reccomend a decent brand of external powered desktop HD?

Thanks

macman

Spike-if the drive is dead and won't spin up then no program on earth will recover it-it's a hardware failure. You've already established that it's not the caddy or connections by swapping it over. Bin it, and back up to a new drive.
If you have data on there that isn't backed up elsewhere, then you are looking at (possible) forensic recovery, which starts at about £300.
Sorry.

fishybusiness

It really depends on the nature of the failure. If Windows is struggling to deal with it, Linux is a good bet.

You could use something like dd_rescue to image the failing drive to a good drive of equal or larger capacity, and then pull the data off the good drive.

Alterntively, look at a live Linux distro, boot it from CD and if possible copy the data from the faulty drive to a good drive.

New drives in general are similar in their reliability, the only ones I saw more faults with were Toshiba's. Samsungs, Seagate, WD's I think are all ok.

macman

That will only work if the drive can be made to spin up. Spike advises that it won't.
You could try the freezer treatment if nothing to lose.

fishybusiness

That will only work if the drive can be made to spin up. Spike advises that it won't.
You could try the freezer treatment if nothing to lose.

Agreed.

We don't know the drive is dead, and trying it in a live Linux environment will if anything confirm its 'deadness'.

andy2004

Stay clear of WD 1.5tb drives. i bought 1. lasted 8months before having to be replaced and then the replacement had to be replaced as well so i'm currently on the 3rd WD 1.5, now saying that in the same length of time i've had 1 samsung 1.5tb in constant use which i bought before the WD.
so samsungs are good. WD are bad.
wouldnt buy another WD ever.
currently got 6 hdds altogether. and 5 are samsungs

macman

fishybusiness wrote: »

Agreed.

We don't know the drive is dead, and trying it in a live Linux environment will if anything confirm its 'deadness'.

'The drive itself is quiet & you cant feel the vibration from the thing spinning'.

Without wishing to re-enact the Dead Parrot sketch, that sounds like it's dead to me.

spike7451

I'm running the above programme,it's picked up the hard drive & the lights flashing like it's running,although it identified the drive as a 2TB drive & not the 500gb on it is...Now the last drive I ran this on was the old C drive in my laptop & that was the same state as this one,but I was able to recover files off that..fingers crossed,if this works,I'll buy a licence for this programme & recover the rest.
Here's hopeful!

macman

It's always worth a try spike, nothing to lose. Fingers crossed, let us know if it works.

spike7451

I'm thinking of these to replace the knackered one & the working Seagate one...opinions?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Intenso-6002540-Memory-Station-External/dp/B0036ZBP7I/ref=sr_1_19?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1342643263&sr=1-19

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buffalo-DriveStation-1-0TB-External-Drive/dp/B004LFLCFC/ref=sr_1_12?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1342643750&sr=1-12

closed

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

http://forums.vr-zone.com/news-around-the-web/402100-seagate-7200-11-no-more-free-data-recovery-more-affected-drives-found.html