External hard drive failure and data recovery help!

mwddrwg

Hope someone can help with this one please.

I have a Western Digital external SATA drive that appears to have failed (clicking sound of death and no lights on...) which has loads of important stuff on it. I gather that data recovery from a failed drive can cost hundreds :eek: so has anyone got any recommendations for companies who do this kind of thing at a reasonable price?

Thanks for any suggestions

By the way, I live in North Wales but can obviously courier the thing anywhere!

jaybeetoo

Western Digital have approved data recovery partners listed on their web site. It would be worth contacting them first.

A friend of mine used http://www.pcmedic.co.uk and said they recovered data off a failed disk for him.

Splott

I would suggest if its easy, to take the caddy apart and try the drive in the PC if you've got a desktop.

It is very rare that the drive itself fails - usually its the USB to SATA adapter in the caddy. Out of all the ones I've done since these things came onto the market years ago, not one has been the hard drive that has failed.

LucianH

I'll be prepared to be shot down for this suggestion, but there is a (almost) last resort of the freezer trick which has worked for me and others.

You need first confirm that it's not an electronic issue if pos (take it out of the caddy) and I believe it's only appropriate for older drivers (since it fixes out-of-tolerance problems as the the drive ages). It also depends on how valuable the data is. I personally can't see a problem with trying it once (taking reasonable precautions to limit condensation (don't fire it up in a very warm and humid evironment)) - put it in the freezer and then fire it up breifly to see if you can access the drive. If it does, you then can take the decision on how large the critical data is that you need to recover and whether you can do it with just one or two cycles in the freezer.

macman

Forensic recovery is always expensive, because of the equipment and premises required (dust free), typically you'll be looking at a price starting at £350.
So your back up drive was in fact not a back up after all, as you deleted the original files?
Try the caddy route first, if that doesn't work then remember that each attempt at DIY recovery may overwrite more of your original data.

mwddrwg

Hi all, thanks for your replies.

I had backed up the family photos in April last year so only missing about 9 months worth I think! It was intended to be a backup drive and was used as such but I have been downloading music for about 2 years on my laptop and putting it on the external without keeping copies so might've lost some albums.

Making enquiries about prices for recovery at the company mentioned above so will keep you posted in case it helps others with the same problem.

chunter

I extracted the hard drive from the caddy and then purchased the exact model of hdd from ebay and swapped the circuit board on the hdd. Worked for me.

I find with externals, it's more likely to mess up the circuitry of the hdd drive rather than the physical hard drive spindle.

Suppose depends whether it's been dropped or not too!

Im_just_careful

For the music, can you re-download it for free ? Some sites allow that.

For the photos, I assume they are not still on the SD card as well.

I keep 2 drives of backup synced up as I hope to avoid your problem !