burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Best Buy’s Geek Squad are awful in many stores. It’s really hard to find a BB with any qualified help. I’ve not had much luck there.

The OP should look into drive recovery software. It’s worth getting a package to have on hand.

Regular, complete backups are the only way to avoid panic like this. Back up to at least one local drive and a cloud service.

blackest Loc: Ireland

If the drive heads have crashed it tends to be that the motor hasn't the torque to spin up.

if all else fails the drive can be opened the heads wound back to park. Once thats been done the drive can spin up and data accessed but the drive is now terminal. I've done this and the drive lasted about an hour and i recovered about 95% of the data before it croaked.

Regular air has dust which is like boulder sized compared to the gap between head and platter and will be grinding off the surface off the drive which will release more particles which increase the destruction rate. The cost of recovering the data professionally wasn't worth the cost so when I got my hands on it the drive was viewed as dead and the data unrecoverable. A drive should only ever be opened in a "clean room" and mostly these are found in drive manufacturing factories.

If this doesn't work, the files are gone for good.

johneccles Loc: Leyland UK

Try this: plug your HDD in and listen to it, place it near your ear and if it's making a gentle humming noise this means the disc is spinning, it should be OK if there is no noise or it's making erratic noises, it's probably dead.

BlueMorel Loc: Southwest Michigan

Don't think this will help, but mine did same thing. Not wanting to spend money, I put it away for a few months, tried it again and it works fine. Obviously I won't use it for important storage, just for transport of larger batches of files.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

There are a number of things that can go wrong, and you did the right thing to test the drive on the other computer. It's a first good step in the process of elimination.

1) Did you change the USB cable?
2) Did you check to see if the drive spins up? Could be a bad power supply, a power cable inside the drive enclosure that is not making a good connection, or the power jack on the case itself is broken or faulty.
3) If the drive is spinning, then I'd check to see if it is seen in Disk Management. Not knowing what version of Windows you are using, you will type diskmgmt.msc in either the start menu (XP, Win 7 Win Vista), or Run to access the snapin utility. Here you will be able to see all attached storage. The Windows Explorer view will not show you a disk with a corrupted Master Boot Record or Boot sector.
4) If the drive is seen but shown as not formatted - its a bad boot sector or MBR. It can be recovered with software, and any halfway competent PC repair guy (or gamer) should be able to recover it.
5) If the drive is not seen at all, it is possible that the data connection inside the drive case could have a bad connection. Over time connectors can become faulty due to oxidation.The solution might be as simple as unplugging the cable from the connector and plugging it in again.
6) If all else fails, you may have a dead drive. Data can be recovered from it, but it will cost you a bunch.

For the future, avoid buying cheap, multi-terabyte hard drives. They are notoriously unreliable. Better to get a Samsung Spinpoint (if they are even available anymore), HGST Ultrastor or Western Digital Black or RE - all of these drives have long warranties - usually 5 yrs. You can buy a case to put it into for around $30 USD, and you will have a redundant backup that will let you sleep at night. In fact, buy two of these, and have your backup software make a copy of your data to both drives.

Al Beatty Loc: Boise, Idaho

I had a similar problem with one of my drives. I took it to a local computer repair shop and had them install the drive in a new case for $30.00. It worked for me and was a lot less than the dollars they wanted to do a "recovery." Take care & ...

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

Many years ago I had that happen with both and Iomega and Western Digital HD's. In each case the degradation occurred with in a month of the purchase.

As a result I went looking and bought a Buffalo 1TB external hard drive consisting of 4 250GB drives co9nfigured with Raid 5. Bought the in, I think, 2007 0r 08. Only problem I've had is a need to replace the power supply.

WessoJPEG Loc: Cincinnati, Ohio

He said he tried it on another PC.

bhapke

There are many different reasons why the drive doesn't work, and many or all have been mentioned in the other responses. I do have a suggestion that hasn't been mentioned. There is a software product called "spinrite" available from www.grc.com that is a hard drive maintenance and repair utility. It has had success in recovering data from "failed" hard drives in some cases. It works by booting the computer from a thumb drive or CD (or even a floppy disk if the computer is that old) in a version of DOS, then running spinrite against the disk. If the drive is external USB, it has to be connected when the computer boots to be recognized due to how the BIOS works.

Spinrite has a money back guarantee so there is little risk. Good luck.

Notorious T.O.D. Loc: Harrisburg, North Carolina

On YouTube search for The Angry Photographer. Ken has video on how to recover hard drives that appear to have died. You can consider his methods. If you have to or choose to have a data recovery company work on getting the data that cost may be covered in part by your homeowners insurance. It was for my dad a few years ago when he had a laptop drive die. They recovered virtually everything.

Best,
Todd Ferguson

ewg963 Loc: Meriden CT USA

Hello Jack I've just used this company from called HDD Services here's their link: http://www.hddrecovery.ca/contact-us/ I find them to be honest and it taught me a lesson to back up my hard drive constantly each and every time I complete a project. Also try some of the other great suggestion here before contacting a hard drive recovery company because it can be very expensive. My cost was $800 to recover my data but however my Seagate drive was spinning without the clicks. I hope this helps. Edit: I'll caution you on opening up your hard drive because the labs use a dust free environment and you may destroy any chances of recovering your data if you chose that route.


Eddie

Tommy II Loc: Northern Illinois

Is it a Seagate?

blackest Loc: Ireland

Sounds like a good company but they are in Canada and he is in Australia. Opening is last ditch but you can get one last hour out of it before it is scrap
if you can afford $800 then do so. in this case its 12 years of the op's life. $66 a year is fairly cheap. even cheaper is another drive with copies.

Hands up who is only one head crash away from losing years of work? Don't cheap out and fail to back up. It can be you tomorrow.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Excellent advice - we read a similar sad post every month. BACKUP NOW!

Mundj Loc: Richmond TX

Have you contacted the support folks at Buffalo. They should be able to help you trouble shoot and may offer some help in recovering your files.