Please help Ex hard drive broke

TaBunny

About 3 months ago I took advice on here about storage options was advised to get external hard drive. So purchased 80gib external viao hard drive from powerseller on ebay with very good feedback. It arrived after 3 days, plug and play had no trouble, transferred all my photos, music, letters, uni work etc onto it.

Turned computer on this morning and tried to access the hard drive thing and there's a message come up saying 'this device has malfuctioned'. I followed the troubleshooter which came up and it told me to check the status of the usb properties on the computer in the device manager, all were ok. Then I saw one with a yellow exclamation mark next to it, it was the hard drive, it said 'this device was prepared for safe removal but was not removed, please remove this device and then re connect the device'. I did not acutally try to remove this ever but did have my camera plugged into another usb the other day and maybe that effected it. I tried this but it did not work even after re starting the computer.

When I re connected the hard drive I got a message saying that the device was malfunctioning and it pointed me in the direction of the same troubleshooter I had already done.

So I went on ebay to try contact the seller but he said as it's been over 3 months it's down to the manufacturer and none of his business, thing is when he supplied it it came in a plain carboard box with no warranty certificate so I can't prove how long I've had it, don't know how to contact VAIO and I don't have any kind of receipt except paypal I suppose.

Thing is it has everything on it, someone told me I could take it to pc world and they could recover the data but that doesn't really help much because the hard drive would still not be working so where would they put the data they recover, I'd have to buy another external hard drive, costing more money to put it on. I've already spent £70 on this hard drive and now I feel I've lost all my money and my data.

So anyone got any ideas which may help kick start it working again please.

crox

Can ebay help?
Have you tried plugging it in to someone elses pc?
Is it a 2.5" (laptop) drive or a 3.5" desktop drive? I'm guessing laptop.
You could try getting a new enclosure for it and hope that it's the usb interface that's fried.

startrekker

Beat me to it Crox

Shot in the dark here, as no-one else has replied. Have you tried the external drive on another pc yet? Just to see if it is a problem with the device, or the usb on your machine. If its a desk top pc you can normally reset the usb/clear it down by unplugging the power completely from the machine ( i did all my cables ) and leaving it for 10 mins or so. Plug everything back in and try your drive again......

albertross_2

if all else fails, take the drive out of the caddy, and connect it up to the ide interface inside the pc.

storing all you files in one place without a backup is not a good idea, disks fails sometimes, disk in caddy's even more so, dvd's are a better backup medium

I doubt pc world can do anything that you can't do yourself. if the actual drive is dead, not spinning, it will need a data recovery specialist, and cost 100's.