Hard drive problems!!

[RBennett]

Ok, so as most of you know my DW bought me a new Pentax K-x this weekend and on the same weekend we learned that she killed my external hard drive!!! I had my Seagate 1TB external hard drive plugged into my laptop when she accidentally knocked it over onto her foot and our couch. Now when I try to plug it in it just makes a low beeping noise for about 5 minutes and then goes quiet. It never powers up and it is never detectable on my computer so I am thinking it is a power problem. What should I do?? Do I spend possibly $14 getting a new power cable and save my data, spend $20 to send it back to Seagate for the warranty replacement and lose my data, or do I try to use data recovery software?

 

[boBQuincy]

If the drive was reading or writing when it fell then your data is probably in jeopardy. If this is your only copy of the data then an error recovery service is probably your best (only) option.

If you have another copy of the data then send it to Seagate although they may say it was an accident and not honor the warranty.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Not good. I'm not an expert, but I seriously doubt that a new power cable will do any good at all. If your computer can't recognize the drive, software isn't going to help either.

If you don't have important data on it, send it in for warranty replacement. If you do, you're up a creek. You might try taking the hard drive out of the enclosure and connect it directly to your PC. If it is an enclosure problem, you should be able to get it working that way.

 

[RBennett]

Yeah, it wasn't actually doing anything with the data at the time but it was plugged up to my laptop at the time. The thing that scares me, is that all of my pictures are backed up in 3 places: the hard drive, my laptop, and my desktop computer. Well the hard drive now appears to be shot, and my wife told me last week that the desktop is a goner too! We turn on the laptop and it says there is a problem with the hard drive and I need to press F4. Well, when I press F4 nothing happens. So I say all of that to say... if something happens to my laptop I just lost ALL of my RAW files.

 

[MICKEY88]

I like Marks idea.

if ya don't wanna open up your pc to connect, you could get a dock to stick it in..

I use this one... http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Thermaltake+-+Dual+Bay+Docking+Station+for+Most+Internal+SATA+Hard+Drives/9419596.p?id=1218102199901&skuId=9419596&st=thermaltake%20hard%20drive%20dual%20dock&cp=1&lp=5
one thing though there is probably sometype of sticker on it over one of the mounting screw, removing this to get to screw will most likely void warranty,
personally I'd skip sending to seagate and try to recover the files

 

[shafke]

First and foremost... if you have only one accessible copy of your files purchase a new external drive and back up what you have.

As for the external drive that fell... maybe when it fell a connection was jarred loose. If you don't want to open it to find out maybe drop it on opposite side to reconnect (joking about that).

 

[photo_chick]

I think you just learned a lesson that many don't understand until they hit a problem like you are... hard drives are not suitable as your only method of backup. They have far too many moving parts that can break or be scrambled by a power surge. Now solid state drives... that's another story.

If the drive is beeping it's getting power of some kind, though something could be wonky I doubt it's the cable as well. Beeping repeatedly is usually a serious error code. You might try data recovery but if the fall damaged the HDD surface then it's toast anyway. It does not have to be reading or writing during a fall to damage it either. But it could just be, as mentioned, that something is loose inside.

 

[RBennett]

I might try and see about opening the casing tonight when I get home, just to see if anything appears to be loose. The weird thing is, it only fell a total of 8 inches! It was on the end table next to my couch, and then DW bumped it when she was standing on the couch to put the curtains up, so it fell from basically the height of our armrest to the couch cushion. She says that a coworker of hers' husband also works on computers on the side, so she might see if he could look at it for us. I'm not worried about losing my pictures (with the exception of the RAW files) because EVERY jpeg picture I have is on my smugmug site backed up as well. But I just hate to think about losing the RAW files.

 

[photo_chick]

You know, what keeps sticking in my mind is how your other computers are having hard drive issues as well. Is it possible you are being systematically targeted by a virus and the fall just happens to be coincidental?

 

[RBennett]

You know, what keeps sticking in my mind is how your other computers are having hard drive issues as well. Is it possible you are being systematically targeted by a virus and the fall just happens to be coincidental?

Honestly, I would think the exact same thing (especially since it DID cross my mind) but do viruses attack external hard drives? I'm sure they do. But also, I haven't had my desktop computer hooked up to the internet this year. And it only started malfunctioning last Thursday or so. I wonder if it could just be age. This thing has lasted us for 10 years!

 

[photo_chick]

Is your computer connected to your network? Do you share files between all the affected computers at all? If there is a port open where it can communicate on a network at all then it is vulnerable. And some viruses will sit there, latent for a long time before they activate.

Viruses will attack anything they can re-write the data on. External hard drives, flash drives, memory cards, floppys... it depends on what the virus was designed to do though. We had a pervasive virus go though our network via the shared docs folders. We weren't sharing files at the time, but because the permissions were set to it moved though them and hit every computer in the house, including the Macs that were set up to share with Windows PC's.

They can be nasty suckers.

That may or may not be your issue. But the fall you're talking about really does not sound like that much and it makes me wonder....

 

[seashoreCM]

Even an eight inch fall could damage the sockets the cables plug into if everything goes just wrong enough.

Who suggested opening up the external hard drive case and extracting the drive and connecting the drive directly to a computer? There are two common kinds of PC drives, PATA/IDE and SATA. Each requires a different kind of cable and not all computers accept the SATA. There are also machine specific peculiarities that may make what seems like a straightforward drive connection not work. Sometimes a hard drive you are connecting won't coexist with the hard drive already inside the computer, the latter you need to boot the computer so you can do things with the former. Geek squads (tm) and similar fixit services do things like this.

 

[MICKEY88]

Even an eight inch fall could damage the sockets the cables plug into if everything goes just wrong enough.

Who suggested opening up the external hard drive case and extracting the drive and connecting the drive directly to a computer? There are two common kinds of PC drives, PATA/IDE and SATA. Each requires a different kind of cable and not all computers accept the SATA. There are also machine specific peculiarities that may make what seems like a straightforward drive connection not work. Sometimes a hard drive you are connecting won't coexist with the hard drive already inside the computer, the latter you need to boot the computer so you can do things with the former. Geek squads (tm) and similar fixit services do things like this.

that's why I suggested a dock it it's a sata drive, it will continue to act just like an external drive.. if it is and ide drive another enclosure would be an option...

I'm not 100% on this, but shouldn't an external work if put in a pc, since it's set as a secondary drive not a boot drive,

geek squads also charge a lot for something you can do yourself if you take the time to google for directions, and are not afraid to open your pc..

 

[photo_chick]

Most motherboards will be able to use an IDE or SATA drive. True, you may have to get a cable, but they are cheap. It should not pose a problem connecting it, though you may have to set some jumpers if you have an IDE drive but that is very simple to do. If there are no SATA ports on the mobo you can buy a card to connect to. I've never not been able to get hard drives to work together. Sometimes they are finicky, but there is no reason why they should not work together when properly configured.

Another option is to pick up a new enclosure for the drive. But if the problem is with the HDD itself then you're out that cash. Of course you can always pop another drive into the new enclosure to make use of it. Or you could get a dock if it's an SATA drive as mentioned...

There are a lot of ways to approach the problem and a lot of things that could be wrong.. It's easy to speculate from this end and be way off base.

But still... the beeping mentioned is an error code. Count the beeps (if they are in sets) and google it. You may find your solution there.

Geek squads do overcharge and are often fairly untrained. There are some good ones out there, but they are hard to find among the inept and clueless.

 

[Groucho]

Obviously if you open the enclosure then you void the warranty... that's the only concern there. But it's much more likely that the hard drive inside has failed than the enclosure.

If things were desperate, data recovery places like Drivesavers can recover just about everything off almost any failed hard drive... but it's expensive (like $1k and up.)

Mickey88, yes, the drives inside external enclosures are just regular internal drives, so you can plug them directly into your motherboard.

RBennett - a virus cannot damage hardware and certainly can't make your hard drive fail. They can delete data - but really, destructive viruses are very rare nowadays. Virtually everything today is your basic malware: harmless but annoying fake antispyware programs trying to shake you down into paying them money, programs that throw up ads in order to get revenue from your eyeballs, or ones that sit silently in the background to use your PC as part of a botnet and/or steal your private data. Heck, any true virus is pretty rare nowadays.

In terms of the sounds, try checking this site - it is Drivesavers' hard drive "simulator" and will give you the sounds of various types of hard drive failure. Pretty neat.

 

[MICKEY88]

Mickey88, yes, the drives inside external enclosures are just regular internal drives, so you can plug them directly into your motherboard.

this site - it is Drivesavers' hard drive "simulator" and will give you the sounds of various types of hard drive failure. Pretty neat.

I know they are basically internal drives, I was replying to the comment that they will conflict with the pc's main drive, tht's why i said they're secondary drives not boot drives..


I actually bought a small portable 250 gig drive to upgrade my laptop since it was only 60gig, I used my dock to clone it, then put it in..

 

[manning]

SSD has arrived !!!!!

 

[RBennett]

So a funny turn of events! I went ahead and surprised DW with buying a new laptop AND a new external hard drive. I got a 1 TB HP hard drive and an Acer 160Gb laptop, but I just found out that my laptop doesn't even have enough memory to hold my CURRENT pictures let alone grow any. So what I have decided to do is to go buy a new INTERNAL hard drive and swap it out. I bought the Acer because I don't have a lot of demand for my needs other than space, and it was CHEAP. At a 160Gb now I know why. So I bought a 640 Gig internal drive and will be swapping 'em out this afternoon.

 

[MICKEY88]

So a funny turn of events! I went ahead and surprised DW with buying a new laptop AND a new external hard drive. I got a 1 TB HP hard drive and an Acer 160Gb laptop, but I just found out that my laptop doesn't even have enough memory to hold my CURRENT pictures let alone grow any. So what I have decided to do is to go buy a new INTERNAL hard drive and swap it out. I bought the Acer because I don't have a lot of demand for my needs other than space, and it was CHEAP. At a 160Gb now I know why. So I bought a 640 Gig internal drive and will be swapping 'em out this afternoon.

how did the hard drive swap go

 

[RBennett]

how did the hard drive swap go

FLAWLESS! It took me all of about 2 - 2 1/2 hours to make a recovery disk, swap them out and then reinstall Windows on the laptop but as of this morning all of my photos are now on my new laptop and I am up and running! It just so happens that the internal hard drive I bought (which I based off of size/reviews) was the EXACT same make/model of the one already IN my laptop with the exception of being 4x bigger. Talk about coincedence! So all in all, I was able to get a laptop for $369, a 1Tb external hard drive for $99, and a 640Gb internal hard drive for $94 = $572!