Hard drive toast?

[Danolo]

I have an external hard drive that fell to the floor and is now non-responsive.  The power light comes on but the computer does not see it when I plug it into a USB port.

Should I just trash it and get a new one, or can it be fixed?   I suspect not, but one of you computer gurus might have an idea?

Thanks

 

Edited June 14, 2020 by Danolo

[Atlas]

Mate,

If you have nothing important stored on it, toss it. If you do, try to recover the data, then toss it. Either way toss it.  

[Tom Tit]

Exactly the same thing happened to me 5 years ago. Dropped it on a concrete floor, and it wouldn’t show on the desktop any more but it flashed its light and made an odd whirring noise. 
 

It had hundreds of family/girlfriend/vacation photos on it, lots of music, and letters/emails to and from friends of which I had no other copies, as well as business stuff I was working on. I took it to a computer repair shop. Dude checked it and said yes he could get all my data back, but it would take a few days and cost US$900.

I took it home and genuinely thought about it for a few days. Lost sleep over it. Then I decided not to go ahead. I was within an ace of caving in and paying.

Fast forward to 5 years later. Has it ever crossed my mind that I miss any of the stuff I lost and wish I’d paid for data recovery? Nope. Never.

Bin it and move on. Make sure you back up everything better from now on. I do. (Use cloud and/or Dropbox. Pay. It’s worth it.)

And I’ve had quiet a few short times with that $900 I saved, thank you kindly.

Tom Tit

Edited June 15, 2020 by Tom Tit

[plahgat]

My La Cie 1 TB hardrive stopped working by itself, no blue light comes on!?

I thought it was the ac/dc adapter only and changed it, the light now comes on, but still can not open the hardrive when connected to my computer?

I can hear a regular clicking sound when it´s on, but nothing else happens! 

Plahgat

[Edge]

 

Shit happens.........sometimes a lot.  

[Fumbduck]

I'd open up the enclosure and take the drive out. I have seen in the past where the harddisk was actually still working, but the circuitry or the connector inside the enclosure was dead. If you have a harddisk docking station - you can get one of those for around 500 THB - then stick it in there and see if it shows up. If you have a desktop PC, you could also open that up and connect the drive with SATA-cables to the motherboard and the power-supply (If you don't know what that looks like then just look at how the existing drive is connected and do the same, in a SATA port adjacent to where that drive is connected). Needless to say (I hope), turn the PC off before you do this, then power it up again and see if it's there.

You might have to get a bit physical when getting the harddisk out of the enclosure. A lot of those are not made to be easily opened up again, but if the alternative is to just throw the disk away, what do you have to lose?

If/when you do bin the harddisk, BTW, it's always good practice to run a drill through it or otherwise f*ck it up good and proper. You never know in this day and age.

[Farangkie]

With hard drives  , it's not a matter of IF, but WHEN they will eventualy stop working .

That's why all my Pattaya "home movies" are  on at least 2 different hard drives.

Edited June 15, 2020 by Syco

[fugtugly]

I have an external hard drive that fell to the floor and is now non-responsive.  The power light comes on but the computer does not see it when I plug it into a USB port.
Should I just trash it and get a new one, or can it be fixed?   I suspect not, but one of you computer gurus might have an idea?
Thanks
 

Sounds like the enclosure is broken. If the drive is an ssd (solid state drive) then the fall wouldn't do much chances at all.
If its older and is a platter drive if its getting power you should hear the drive spin up.

Can you take pictures of the external enxlousre and i can assist in the Hard drive removal? I want to make sure you purchase the correct adapter.



Sent from my SM-A515W using Tapatalk

[Danolo]

Thanks for all your replies.

The data that was in the drive was all copied from an old desktop hard drive, that I was about to reformat. Fortunately I didn't so I'll just get a new one and re-copy.

Thanks for the tip about drilling a hole through the old one. Good idea.

That should be a fun project for my balcony.

Thanks.

 

[Kandinski]

7 hours ago, Edge said:

 

Shit happens.........sometimes a lot.  

Edge unplugged?

[Danolo]

2 hours ago, fugtugly said:

Can you take pictures of the external enxlousre and i can assist in the Hard drive removal? I want to make sure you purchase the correct adapter.

Thanks for your offer to help. I have decided to drill it and let it go.   I did try to crack it open but could not get it open without major work, so I gave up.

I'd offer to send it to you, a fellow Canadian, but with our outrageous postage rates, I'll not bother.

Since I am going to drill it, maybe I'll have one more try at opening it up, but I'm not enthusiastic. 

Thanks

 

[Edge]

7 hours ago, Kandinski said:

Edge unplugged?

Yes indeed.
I won't bore you except to say that HDDs don't like being submerged even though they appear to recover.

I currently have about 14 working HDD/SSDs (5 on board) and one thing I do now is to run 'Hard Disk Sentinel'
It monitors everything and scans for error build up.
It warned me twice as Disk Health fell to dangerous levels so that I had time to act.
It also warned me when, due to dust build up in my PC intakes, I was running at well over 50 degrees.

I got my Pro' copy from the Pirates and it's running all the time in the background, but I gather you can also check manually in Win10................  https://youtu.be/z0k0br8465c

 

Edited June 16, 2020 by Edge

[fugtugly]

9 hours ago, Danolo said:

Thanks for your offer to help. I have decided to drill it and let it go.   I did try to crack it open but could not get it open without major work, so I gave up.

I'd offer to send it to you, a fellow Canadian, but with our outrageous postage rates, I'll not bother.

Since I am going to drill it, maybe I'll have one more try at opening it up, but I'm not enthusiastic. 

Thanks

 

if you want to hang onto it I will be back in Pats when I can.  

But drilling is a fun way to make them die.

[Greg_B]

17 hours ago, Fumbduck said:

If/when you do bin the harddisk, BTW, it's always good practice to run a drill through it or otherwise f*ck it up good and proper. You never know in this day and age.

Army hacker told me to put it in the toaster as he can't recover from this

[Atlas]

3 hours ago, Edge said:

Yes indeed.
I won't bore you except to say that HDDs don't like being submerged even though they appear to recover.

I currently have about 14 working HDD/SSDs (5 on board) and one thing I do now is to run 'Hard Disk Sentinel'
It monitors everything and scans for error build up.
It warned me twice as Disk Health fell to dangerous levels so that I had time to act.
It also warned me when, due to dust build up in my PC intakes, I was running at well over 50 degrees.

I got my Pro' copy from the Pirates and it's running all the time in the background, but I gather you can also check manually in Win10................  https://youtu.be/z0k0br8465c

 

Thanks for the tip mate. 

Back in the day I had a system like yours, but since moving to Patts I moved to laptop... I did end up bringing my PC but it never ran again.... Could not be assed trying to get it running, though I miss the power for Photoshop and the like...

[Fumbduck]

1 hour ago, Greg_B said:

Army hacker told me to put it in the toaster as he can't recover from this

Maybe that's what the OP was alluding to with the title of this thread? Anyway, doing that with your household toaster might make your next piece of real toast taste a bit off. My personal favourite is to split them with a plasma cutter, but not everyone has one of those sitting around.

[Danolo]

6 minutes ago, Fumbduck said:

My personal favourite is to split them with a plasma cutter, but not everyone has one of those sitting around.

I think the "toast{" reference goes way back when an electronic item might burn out, or toast.  Now its common vernacular in Canada.

We don't make toast with a plasma cutter. Isn't that the tool used to break into vaults?

[Fumbduck]

5 hours ago, Danolo said:

I think the "toast{" reference goes way back when an electronic item might burn out, or toast.  Now its common vernacular in Canada.

I think it's a fairly common expression everywhere, but maybe my 'punning'-skills are waning...

5 hours ago, Danolo said:

We don't make toast with a plasma cutter.

Toast is generally not electrically conductive, so I agree it would be somewhat difficult.

[CyberPro]

On 14/06/2020 at 09:56, Danolo said:

I have an external hard drive that fell to the floor and is now non-responsive. 

I read that the amount drop tolerance for spinning drives is 1/4 inch. 

On 14/06/2020 at 22:02, Tom Tit said:

(Use cloud and/or Dropbox. Pay. It’s worth it.)

Agreed. I have a couple cloud backups, including Dropbox (2 TB for about $20 USD/mon I think). Since I've used Dropbox for years it's easy for me to use although it's claim of "conflicted" file versions gets annoying at times. At the moment I'm trying to upload an encrypted file larger than Dropbox is supposed to allow. It looks like it's going to fail but I'll try a bit longer before splitting the file into smaller pieces and/or using an encryption application like Boxcryptor. ;)

On 15/06/2020 at 16:44, Edge said:

...one thing I do now is to run 'Hard Disk Sentinel'

Thanks for the tip. That looks pretty handy. For $30 USD that would be a good complement to used Ebay drives. ;)

Edited June 17, 2020 by CyberPro

[Pole]

If you have the right screwdrivers open it up and use the magnets.  If you don't they are harder to open but not impossible.

[plahgat]

On 15/06/2020 at 11:01, plahgat said:

My La Cie 1 TB hardrive stopped working by itself, no blue light comes on!?

I thought it was the ac/dc adapter only and changed it, the light now comes on, but still can not open the hardrive when connected to my computer?

I can hear a regular clicking sound when it´s on, but nothing else happens! 

Plahgat

Just an update! It turned out to be the AC/DC adapter after all! I ordered a used one of exactly the same model as mine from Ebay for about 10 $, and to my relief it worked! 

Plahgat