dblackard Loc: Rockport Texas

I have a western digital external hard drive, one tb that is saying it is unreadable. have i lost everything?? any way to fix??

Roger Hicks Loc: Aquitaine

Good news: most of the data is almost certainly recoverable. Bad news: it's a specialist & expensive undertaking.

Good luck,

R.

PrairieSeasons Loc: Red River of the North

I've had to have a 1tb disk recovered twice. www.compurecovery.com did it both times with 100% success. It cost $700 plus a new disk each time and took a couple of weeks. (and I now use Carbonite)

sloscheider Loc: Minnesota

Other than paying someone else to deal with it there's not a quick simple answer.

- It could be a bad circuit board either in the external drive housing or on the drive itself. do you have another identical external drive? If so, move the unreadable drive to the other box and see if it works. Sometimes you can replace the circuit board that's built into the drive and get it working too but again, you need a matching drive - look on e-bay for low cost "working" mates to cannibalize.

- Was it noisy? Perhaps you have heard a whiny whirring sound? If so, it could be the platter bearings... often times when this happens the platters begin to wobble and the platters will be physically damaged where they made contact with the heads and the heads would likely be damaged as well. If this is the case your only hope is to pay a recovery service to rebuild the drive with new bearings and heads, and then they MIGHT be able to recover some data from the areas of the platters that weren't damaged.... MIGHT being the key word here.

- Stick the thing in your freezer overnight. Have EVERYTHING else ready to go - computer up and running with the file explorer open. Pull the drive from the freezer, plug it in and with some luck you will get the drive to work for 5 or MAYBE 10 minutes to copy your stuff off it... sounds crazy but many hard drive problems are heat related - bad bearings generate heat and then start to be flaky... keep them cold as long as possible and you may get more time. Pack frozen gel packs around the drive if you have to.

- sometimes the motors get weak and can't spin up the platters. As above, have EVERYTHING ready before starting: remove the cover of the drive so you can see the platters. Turn on the drive and give the platters a helping spin to get them going. Yes, this too sounds crazy but I have witnessed this in action and it worked. The drive will be worthless after this - opening the drive is the last thing you want to attempt because it becomes contaminated with dust.

Do all the above things at your own risk. There is electricity and moving parts involved so use your common sense. If you've got the cash and don't understand the risks or you just don't want to mess with it pay someone else to do these things for you - they will have a "clean room" so when the drive is opened up dust contamination will be far less likely.

dblackard Loc: Rockport Texas

Wow, expensive! thanks for the answers. Now just for the record, it is not kept plugged in , only plugged in when in use. no noises, it didnt go out gradually but the cord was pulled out while it was opened up on the computer. It simply puts up an error message saying Files not readable.

snowbear

It may not be that expensive. Search for drive recovery software and try to find a trial copy. Download a few and see if they work. I just ran into this same problem - the drive won't mount. The trial version was able to access the drive and recover a couple of photos. I now have to buy it (trial is limited to 5 MB recovery) for about $100. I just have to wait a couple of weeks.

RMM Loc: Suburban New York

Check with the manufacturer. There is some software that is installed on a hard drive which allows the operating system to recognize it. If it was damaged, it may be a simple utility fix, using the manufacturer's software. You DON'T want to format the drive, but possibly it's just installing the device driver. If you hear unusual noises from the drive, bad things are happening, shut it down. Professional data recovery services are EXPENSIVE.

Whatever you do, PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

francesca3 Loc: Sausalito, CA

I have recovered computer information (iincluding photos) that I thought was lost, without great expense (unless you need forensic retrieval).
Find a good computer repair place/person. Even Best Buy Geek Squad can do it, although they charge more than other places. Shouldn't cost more that 1-200 hundred dollars, which is a nice spanking to learn the lesson of backing up your information on either another computer, external hardrive, Cloud storage, or CD/DVD's.

BboH Loc: s of 2/21, Ellicott City, MD

Had the same thing happen to me - twice, first with an Iomega then with a Western Digital. In neither case did I deem what I lost valuable enought to go to the expense of recovery. What I've done to avoid the loss again - now it would be valuable - is I bought a Buffalo 1 terrabite external. Its comprised of 4 250 gigabite drives, configured to RAID 5. I lose 1, maybe 2 drives, replace them and the RAID 5 restores what was on the replaced drives. Did this about 6 years ago, have had no trouble, but...

dblackard Loc: Rockport Texas

thanks for all the great advice. This is actually my best friends external hardrive. though i can still not decide what to back my photos onto. i have them on external harddrive and some on my home computer, but not enough room on that. cds get scratched and i am sure will go out of style soon too. i dont really trust cloud storage. they could close down at any time. was storing them on memory cards but heard they degrade over time as well. i guess short of printing every picture we are all in trouble!! i think i may just get another external hardrive and put pics on both for now until a better option comes along.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

Before losing your mind and jumping out of a window, try unhooking everything USB from your computer (including the suspect hard drive) except the keyboard and mouse, remove all memory cards and travel drives, shut the PC down completely, even unplug it from the wall for at least a few seconds to de-power the motherboard completely, then plug the power back in and boot back up to your desktop with keyboard and mouse only. If it's a laptop, remove the power supply and take out the battery for at least a few seconds.

After you are completely back to the desktop screen, plug in the external drive, and watch to see if USB recognizes the drive and comes back normal.

There are circumstances (and they are random or unexplainable as far as I can tell) where another USB device like a printer or a USB hub or some other will confuse the computer's USB system and it will not recognize a hard drive that has been in the same spot for a long time. Memory cards are also treated as USB devices and show up as hard drives in your File Manager (Windows Explorer).

I've had this happen a few times on my last H-P tower that was XP SP2. I've had my laptop with Vista not recognize that I had plugged in a camera memory card after I did some printing.

But then again, I've had two external drives flip out on their own and destroy their File Allocation Tables beyond ability to salvage them and I had to reformat and lose everything to make them function again. I suspect that happened because of short power outages lasting just a second or two that caused the read/write head to skate across the disk uncontrollably and write crap everywhere it shouldn't have been.

I also had a hard drive motor fail once so the platter wouldn't spin although the rest of the electronics was working. That one was going to cost me $700 to repair but there was nothing I couldn't replace by re-scanning family photos that I still had. Listen to your external hard drive and see if you hear a slight whirring. If that's the problem there's no fixing it without spending the BIG bucks.

Hope these suggestions help.

PhotoArtsLA Loc: Boynton Beach

Go to http://www.prosofteng.com/

Data Rescue 3 is an amazing program. Pretty sure they have it for Windows. I use the Mac version, which will also rescue anything Windows. I have used it to recover hard drives for myself and others. It is very effective and mostly automatic. It does let you, if you want, to recover selectively. You don't have to recover everything.

The damage to the drive and overall fragmentation will control the quality of the recovery. Some files might be truly broken, but usually, you will be surprised as to the quality of the "save."

Take note: the TIME required to rescue a drive can be several hours to several WEEKS. I recovered a PC drive once with a flaky motor. It took 6 weeks, 24/7, and was 100% successful with every file readable and okay.

We should all just pay the digital piper and buy Hitachi hard drives. I have not had to rescue those, just Western Digital, Seagate, and the others. The NEWER, very large drives 2TB and up, are a bit more reliable due to simpler mechanisms.

Finally, for your archives, consider investing in M-Disc. It is the best thing until carbon storage appears.

http://millenniata.com/m-disc/

BobG Loc: Omaha, NE

If you have the ability to disassemble the hard drive from it's enclosure, then connect it to a pc, you can run spinrite on the disk. (www.spinrite.com). Spinrite will cost around $80 but it is well worth it. It is by far the best, non-destructive disk utility out there. I have personally brought back many hard drives that were previously assumed to be hopeless. Hope this helps.

dblackard Loc: Rockport Texas

good advice everyone, thanks so much. i have a question, so far i hear buffalo and hitachi or the kind to get? and also back up on m discs. ( which are just newer dvd's)
can you put m discs in any dvd drive? or do they have to be blue ray?

silverhawk Loc: Born a West Virginian, Living in Virginia

I used mine with a desktop computer and it stopped working....carried it to a "Geek" at Best Buy and was told it was burned up....he had taken it apart and tried everything he knew how..carried it home, put on shelf and thought it was gone....then, later I hooked it to the wife's laptop and it "fired up" right away.....I had purchased another external and hooked them both to her computer and was able to transfer the files...takes a "long time" though, but worth it.....I had photos and records there that I wouldn't have been able to recover......don't know what you have, but I was just lucky in my instance.