External drive loss :(

Sigh....

 

Last weekend one of my external drives stopped being recognized by my desktop computer. I fiddled with it as much as I could but nothing seemed to work. I talked to a buddy about it and he said he'd check it out for me this weekend. After he looked at it, he thought it might be the case that was messing up so we pulled it out and hooked it up as an internal drive. That seemed to do the trick as the drive showed up again and let us into files as usual.....

 

Until the next morning.

 

Seems the actual drive itself was having some sort of internal issues and would only give us access for like 5 minutes or so at a time. We did a trick where you put the drive into the freezer for a few hours and that let us grab a few of my more important files.... like DD photos and other pics from vacations I took years ago.

 

After taking as much as we could from the drive, the desktop finally stopped recognizing the drive altogether and no matter what else we did, the drive wouldn't come back.

 

Needless to say, I still have a ton of things on that drive that I would really like to have back. My entire music library was on there with stuff I don't have on CD. All my videos I had saved from various places of AMV's and LOADS of anime were there too. Plus all my photos of the Star Wars collection I used to own. SO many other things were there too... it just makes me so sad and irate that I can't get that stuff off the drive.

 

I know I'm whining here but I needed to vent about this somewhere. That and maybe see if anyone knows anyone who could help me out with some type of fix or service that doesn't involve me paying a company $1000 or more to retrieve the data. So I'm asking for a favor if any of you out there can lend a hand with this. I'd be happy to pay for the help too, I'm not asking for a freebie or handout. I just can't afford silly high prices for this is all.

 

Thanks for listening to me complain, I feel a little better now.

 

 

 

Billy

I can't help sorry, I just want to say I hope you're able to retrieve your stuff though. That's the bad thing about technology is it is so fickle and fleeting .... ^-^ good luck! ☆

I don't know of any places in the US. There's two I know of here that only charge a few hundred for a HDD recovery (depending on type of recovery). I hate to be the one to say it, but this is why backups are really something necessary. ^^; You can avoid these catastrophic losses if you back up your data.

 

At least with the internet these days, you won't have lost everything since you have posted bunches online. You can always re-get music, anime etc, too. But really, cloud storage or simply having extra HDDs for incremental backups saves these disasters. They're also far cheaper than any recovery services. Most people just don't realise it until it's too late.

Ouch! That really, really sucks. That reminds me, I ought to back up my own stuff. . . Especially my portfolio stuff.

 

Makes me realize how lucky I am that I've only had one hard drive croak on me, and it was waaaay back when I could fit all my files on a single CD with room to spare. (I was surprised I could manage that even at the time, to be honest.) That one bit it because it got slammed with spyware--literally, fifteen *thousand* spyware programs got detected, in the brief post-BSOD time we wrangled to try to recover things. I've been pretty paranoid about scanning things since! It was like that Strong Bad email "Virus", only it didn't rewrite reality, thankfully.

About 2 months ago, my hard drive failed on me as well... I did not have nearly as much stuff on mine, and I was devastated. I'm really sorry that you lost so many things. I have lost 2 hard drives and it really sucks... Most of my stuff I could always get back again, and I was still upset. I know I'd be super sad if I lost irreplaceable photos. I'm so sorry. >__<

 

I'm not an expert on computers or anything... I have friends that are, so I will ask them, and then get back to you. However, until I get to speak to them I found some sites...

 

This one has a LOT of different options, one of them says that the program is free... The section under "Recover Your Data with Software" says there is a free program called Recuva. http://lifehacker.com/5982339/diy-data-recovery-tricks-for-when-your-hard-drive-goes-belly-up

 

If nothing on there works, or if you and your friend tried it already, this site says they recover data: http://www.salvagedata.com/recovery-services/hard-drive-recovery/ I do not know the prices, I think you have to "submit a case" to get a quote. However they seem legit and claim to have cost-effective service plans. I'm sure every business will claim that, but out of the websites I found they seemed most reputable.

 

EDIT/ADDITIONS: I have two kinds of friends. Some that try to give advice, and the others who say all the things that should have been done. -_- Despite this, I will still post what I was told because I guess anything can help?

 

1) One of them suggested that you try to hook up two hard drives. One that you know works, and then your failed hard drive. He said to boot up with the one that you know will work, and then try to access the broken/failed hard drive from there. Maybe you would be able to move the files over. I am not sure if you tried this already, whenever you said you set up the external drive as an internal one. If that is what you tried already, my apologies. ^^"

 

2) The other friend said that in the future to save your photos, to use a USB stick instead. He said it would be less likely to fail, they are cheap, and they have faster importing/exporting. Albeit that is not really going to help right now, I figured I would add it for future reference.

 

I'll continue to make additions as I ask more of my friends.

This has happened to me and what I tried was to connect the drive to other USB ports on the same computer and if that doesn't work try attaching to another computer. I had success with doing that with the exception of one flash drive that was just beyond repair and could not be read by any computer.

 

Yes, your drive may be corrupted but another computer might do the trick in reading and retrieval.

 

Sorry about this problem but there is still hope!

This has happened to me and what I tried was to connect the drive to other USB ports on the same computer and if that doesn't work try attaching to another computer. I had success with doing that with the exception of one flash drive that was just beyond repair and could not be read by any computer.

 

Yes, your drive may be corrupted but another computer might do the trick in reading and retrieval.

 

Sorry about this problem but there is still hope!

 

This. I can't remember exactly what my husband did when his laptop died but I do remember he took out the hard drive and did something similar. Also, there's this on the internet that I saw regarding recovery: hard Drive Data Recovery. Don't know if it would help but maybe you can try the software they mentioned and see if that would work.

 

I hope you get most, if not all your files back.

Ouch! Yeah, HDD failures are a pain to deal with.

 

Hard to say what's wrong with it but one thing caught my eye: the fact that it worked when it was cold. To me as an electronics engineer, that tells me you're most likely dealing with a temperature dependent failure inside one or more of the components on the HDD circuit board. Bad solder joints on the HDD circuit board is also a possibility. A bad solder joint can make contact when cold but as the components and ciruit board heats up, the gap in the solder joint expands and you get a bad connection.

 

If you have access to another external HDD case, then put the HDD in that one (if the case you were using is defective too). Put the case with the HDD in the freezer, close the freezer door and sneak the cable out through the gap between the freezer door and the freezer and hook it up to the PC. That way you can use the HDD while it's in the freezer and it'll stay colder while running. It could give you a couple more minutes of operating time.

Thanks for all the messages peeps!

 

More info for yall...

 

1) We did try the freezer method, that's how we were able to snag the photos we did. We did it 5 times before the drive quit being recognized by my desktop.

 

2) The first thing I did after restarting my computer and the drive was to swap out USB ports on the back of the desktop tower and the cord itself. I then tried it on my laptop and nothing worked. That's what led me to asking my friend about all this.

 

3) The problem is definitely an internal one and not the outer casing as we had hoped. So any recovery programs/software won't help the issue. My friend said the odd noises and such were due to either the motor failing or the reading arm going out.

 

4) I was able to find a few places in SC that do data recovery. One is in my town and I'm dropping the drive off to him tomorrow for a free estimate of what it will take and cost to extract the stuff from it. He said most of the time it'll run about $200-$250 for the labor and then whatever another drive to put the info on runs. I told the guy over the phone what we had already done and altho he wasn't happy to hear about the noises it was making, he said he'd still see if he could do something for me. Truthfully I don't expect him to be able to get much but *anything* at this point would be nice. We'll see how things go after I drop it off tomorrow after work. I'll update here with whatever happens.

 

 

 

Billy

1) We did try the freezer method, that's how we were able to snag the photos we did. We did it 5 times before the drive quit being recognized by my desktop.

Ooops, my bad! I kinda assumed you took it out of the freezer before hooking it up to the PC.

 

Anyway, it'll be interesting to hear if he can recover anything.

More good news but not as good as I'd like.

 

Seems that I forgot that I gave my Mom all my music that was on my drive last year. So all I have to do to get back about 80% of my music is grab her drive this weekend and move all the files over!

 

Also, almost all the new music I added to my drive since I gave my Mom the stuff on hers is on my phone so that will be easy to get back into the desktop too! Yay for thinking!

 

 

Billy

Aw hell yeah! Maybe I'm weird, but if I were in your shoes getting my music back would be right behind portfolio and photos--really close behind--so to me that sounds like excellent news. Granted, that probably means library metadata like playlists is probably still shot, but at least the vast majority of the songs will be there.

 

I do realize there's still a lot you haven't made progress on recovering yet, but at least you'll have rockin' tunes to keep you going while you work on it.

Aw hell yeah! Maybe I'm weird, but if I were in your shoes getting my music back would be right behind portfolio and photos--really close behind--so to me that sounds like excellent news. Granted, that probably means library metadata like playlists is probably still shot, but at least the vast majority of the songs will be there.

 

Well, to tell you the truth, I do have most of my music on CD. I used to collect them years ago and I own over 800 discs/albums. But I was NOT looking forward to having to rip all those things onto the computer again. That took me forever the last time. On the bad side of that, I lost all my ripped CD songs I got from a buddy years ago. He had over 500 discs that I put onto that drive and I won't be able to get those again.

 

And yes, even tho I'll have almost all of my music back, all the playlists I had made will be gone. Rebuilding those will take a long time. But I agree with you, the music was VERY important to me. I've always been into music and stereos so losing all that would have really been a hard hit for me to take.

 

I do realize there's still a lot you haven't made progress on recovering yet, but at least you'll have rockin' tunes to keep you going while you work on it.

 

Heh. Thinking about it earlier, there *are* a lot of things on there that I'll probably never get back but it's the DD pics, vacation/travel pics and the music that I wanted the most so getting those is what was important. Anything else I can manage to get is just gravy.

 

 

Billy

One thing I've learned the hard way is that the only good way to do backups of hard drives is to have another hard drive the exact same size, and just copy everything once in a while. For a while whenever I bought drives, I would buy them in pairs. Now I just have one giant HDD that automatically backs up everything.

 

The thing with HDDs is that it's not a matter of if your drive will fail, but when.