Feedback Invited

[finfly1]

My best friend had an external hard drive fail to work less than a year after purchase. It was stored in a drawer, not too hot, not too cold, wet, near electricity nor was it dropped nor drinks spilled upon it.

When plugged into any computer, it would light up and whirr, but no computer would 'recognize' it was there. A Radio Shack employee took it home to see if the case was the problem, and could not make it work.

I posted this info on a totally different website and received the following response. I am soliciting more reliable opinions on whether this has a chance of working or not. Thanks in advance.


"Try putting it in the freezer.

Double zip-loc bag it and put it in the coldest part of your freezer for at least 12 hours.

If it does work copy the most important stuff first. It will probably die eventually, but you can try refreezing it a few more times til it completely dies."

[OFSO]

fail to work

This sounds like the sort of definition the Fair Sex often gives me about anything from computers to cookers. NOT very precise. However reading betwen the lines it looks like PC "failed to recognise" which is another kettle of fish altogether. Many reasons for this including pin settings on drive. More info needed including what sort of drive and how connected !

[finfly1]

USB connected external hard drive which powers up, lights up, and makes noise like hard drive spinning but none of the three computers to which it was connected would show the connection existed.

In normal ops, a window opens asking what you want to do with the external.

Failing that, clicking 'computer' will bring up icons of the various drives and one clicks on the 'external' often characterised as F.

There are no apparent problems with the usb cord(s) used in this situation.

[mixture]

finfly1,

The freezer stuff is an old wives tale, utter nonsense and a total myth.

You might say there is "evidence" out there on the internet, but they are just coincidental flukes.

A frozen hard drive that is powered on will accumulate condensation, both on the outside and on the platters. The heads will hit the water condensate and crash onto the platters, scoring the media and wiping out more of your data.

And no, a zip lock bag will do nothing to reduce the amount of condensation inside the drive.

You should also note that many modern hard drives use fluid bearings, so freezing the drive may just prevent the drive from working altogether.

If the data is important to you, send it to a professional disk recovery place.

Oh and next time.... please..... BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP !!!!!!!

[finfly1]

Thank you all. Acknowledged and wilco.

[Airborne Aircrew]

A good strategy for external drives is to use them only as a copy. So you keep the original on the internal drive(s) and a copy on the external. If necessary, (because of space restrictions on the internal drives), it is worth using two externals.

You have no backup of anything you have only one copy of.

[mixture]

Airborne Aircrew,

Good idea, and indeed two copies is better than nothing.

But as I said on here the other day bare minimum you should be thinking about is three independent copies at any one time.

[boguing]

Is it usb powered, or does it have a mains supply?

If usb powered, has he tried a double usb lead - two plugs to computer, one to drive? I bought an external blu-ray drive that won't work without one, even though it arrived with a single lead. USB has a maximum current per plug.

If it has a mains lead, has he tried a different one?

As the chap form Radio Shack may or may not know what he is doing, I'd suggest that if your friend has a pc - as opposed to laptop - take the drive out of it's case and connect to the main board with sata/ide lead.

If that doesn't work, buy an identical secondhand drive and swap the circuit boards over. Done that three times, successfully.

Thereafter, it's specialist time and about £300.

[mixture]

If that doesn't work, buy an identical secondhand drive and swap the circuit boards over. Done that three times, successfully.

And you've checked they're running the same firmware version, have you ?

Good for you if you've managed to play the lottery that would have been ... the chances of picking up an identical hard drive in the shops or ebay with the exactly the same specs are fairly remote !

[boguing]

I should have mentioned the fact that I make sure that the serial numbers are close. Revisions tend to get a noticeably different number.

And yes, I've had to wait a while for the right one to come up.

[A A Gruntpuddock]

Please bear in mind that an external hard drive has 2 components,the drive and the connecting circuitry.

It may be that the interface has failed but the actual drive is still ok, so pleas don't just shove it all into a bin.

See if you can find someone with a spare, compatible enclosure and try the drive in that.

Or even just bung the drive into a computer to see if it works when the interface is removed.

[Avtrician]

If you go in to Admin tools from control panel, then computer management, disk management, is the drive listed there. It may be trying to use the same drive letter as another drive. If so reassign the drive letter and try again.

[NaKalloy]

I've tried the freezer bag trick and made it work. Sort of. Twice in maybe 30 attempts on different drives. On both occassions I got the drive running long enough to extract SOME data from it before totally dying.
Its just another last-gasp long shot technique which might just work the odd time.

In the case of this USB drive, the first thing to do is split open the USB caddy and remove the drive from inside, and connect it to a computer though the IDE or SATA interface. The problem may well be with the USB circuitry in the caddy, not the drive. Next step if you can get one, is swap the drive circuit board with one from an identical drive from the same batch / revision number series. But if the data has value, don't do this. Use a professional data recovery service