John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

The Best Buy Geek Squad is gennerally focussed on Best Buy products. They might have the tools and know-how, but the incentive might not be there.

dcearls Loc: Long Island, NY

If the drive is recognized when plugged into the computer it is probably not a dead drive. Most likely it became corrupted which can result from unplugging before it's ready to be unplugged. ( I always use the disconnect utility in the system tray whether it's with drives, SD cards, USB sticks since I have lost all of the above). If the drive is corrupted you may have only lost the allocation table which basiclly tells your computer where to look for your data and your data could very well be there perfectly intact. Don't keep trying to do repairs, it may only make it worse. Depending on how important the data is to you there are various recovery utilities that can recover your data ranging from free to paid as well as data recovery companies, once again how valuable is the data to you? I have recovered data in the past and I found most of the free options were too limited in capability, I ended up buying a program by EASUS(?) which did the job, but be prepared .... every file that was written to the drive will be recovered including deletions that have not been over written on the drive and you won't recognize any of the file names because they will all be in "computer speak" as opposed to what you named them. Learned my lesson the hard way and now I always wait for the computer to tell me when it's safe to unplug.

elent

A last ditch (cheaper) approach might be to do a quick format (just erases the address portion) and then use a data recovery program set to the photo format you use. I've done this with accidentally erased drives. Takes time, but it recovered every single photo saved as well as all intact photos previously deleted. Do NOT deep format. There are companies that can take the disks from a dead drive and do recovery....pricey. hope it is just an address sector problem. Good luck.

David in Dallas Loc: Dallas, Texas, USA

I had an external drive failure a few years ago and used a data recovery company to get the information back. They copied the information to a new drive and sent it back to me. It wasn't cheap, but I did get all the data back--none was lost. It was worth the money to me.

nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

Freezing a hard drive is/was a way to loosen a seized spindle bearing, indicated by the drive not spinning up at all. A stuck bearing can also be jarred loose by tapping on the side of a drive gently with something hard. These don't do anything for other mechanical trouble, electrical failure, file system damage, etc.

throughrhettseyes Loc: Rowlett, TX

Cut it out of the case and plug it in internally or get another external case. I fine external drives to have weak power supplies. I need up getting a ide/ sata docking station so I can access all my old drives I have lying around.

Angel Star Photography Loc: Tacoma, WA

I realize there have been many responses to this and I haven't had the time to read through them all. Please forgive any duplication of information here. I have recovered drives in various states of disrepair many times over the years. The worst and last resort was to send a drive to a lab where they could dismanted the drive, remove the platters, and spin them up on their systems. Mind you, this was a last resort and the drive and laptop had been dropped while the laptop was running and my wife at the time had photos she wanted to recover. This was a head crash issue and probably not your case based upon your description.

Before attempting to format and recover, which I would say is the next to the last resort, I recommend the following:

1. Get a Linux live distro disk such as Knoppix. You will probably need to create one by downloading the ISO file and then burning a disk.
2. Shut your system down and connect your external drive
3. Boot your system using the live distro disk. This will NOT damage your system or its files unless you actually do something with the files. Case in point, I have been able to over ride Windows security parameters using Knoppix by twiddling with the files.
4. Your external drive should appear as an available drive on the Linux interface. From here you should be able to copy the files over to some folder you have on your system. I recommend creating a new folder just to be certain your other files are not mistakenly overwritten.
5. After you have copied the files, you can boot up on your usual operating system, verify the files, and then format the external drive if you so desire.

My brother had a similar case but his system would not boot at all. All the Windows repair actions failed. I took his system drive, put it into an external enclosure, connected it to my system, used Knoppix to recover his data and programs, and rebuiilt his system on a new drive. When all was done, his system looked as though nothing had happened.

In your case, if the controller in the enclosure is bad---not likely but possiible---you would need to obtain a different enclosure to get this to work. The other issue would be to if the partition table is too corrupted but in such cases it may be possible to "bit walk" through the drive and recover the data by rebuiding the partition table---takes a lot of time is the downside.

If you have not found any satisfactory solutions from other resources such as Best Buy, Frys, etc. Send my a private message and I will be glad to help in any way possible.

C. R. Smith (Charles)
Angel Star Photography
www.angelstarphotography.com

C6Joe Loc: NorthWestern Nevada

I did not read this entire thread,

but...

I sure hope you haven't done any of the suggestions to reformat the drive, quick or other wise.

Don't know what op system you are using, but...the first and only thing I would suggest doing is to run the program (Built into Win 7 and earlier, probably 8 and 10 as well) that repairs the BAM and FAT of the hard drive. (CMD entered into the 'search programs and files' line, in the START window, will take you to the window) in the DOS command line, type: CHKDSK. If you get an error message sating you need to invoke elevate mode, then in the search program bar, type CMD but ***don't** hit enter, right click the file name that pops up in the command box and check run as administrator (i think it is)

99% of the time, that will fix your problem. It will ***NOT*** destroy the data on the drive, in the event of its failure to repair to drive. You would still be able to have data recovery people do their magic, if needed. That will open up an new dos box. Then type CHKDSK /help for a list of commands to use. You will have to make sure you are 'on' the drive assigned by your computer to the attached drive. I believe the command line after you are on that drive is: CHKDSK /F <ENTER> It will go through that drive and repair any bad items it finds.

Please forgive any errors I might have given as I have not done this for several years and I am working from a memory that doesn't always work correctly any longer. ***GRIN***

I have a saying I like to use now: "As I get older, the only thing that keeps getting better, is my forgetter"!

J.

Dikdik Loc: Winnipeg, Canada

Excellent... I keep a bootable optical disk, on my desk, for this purpose. Only use it each month or two... the method is slick and easy.

As Angel Star notes... if you can mount the drive, don't write to it. Copy the files to a brand new directory (folder) ASAP.

Let us know the outcome, if you will.

Dik

carl hervol Loc: jacksonville florida

this is why I have every thing on dvd,s
send it to WD they can retrieve them for you did this a few years ago and they retrieve them and gave a new drive but I still back up on DVD.s

Pstrykacz

I once had a similar situation - all of a sudden my old external hard drive quit (to this day I don't know what exactly happened). I was getting desperate, since I had on this drive literally my entire life, pictures from my early childhood till now, my favourite music, etc...
My son downloaded (paid) software from easeUS and managed to recover for me ALL lost files and folders, which I subsequently stored on a new SOLID STATE external drive. So far, it behaves OK... I am keeping my fingers crossed!

I don't know what is a general consensus on solid state drives, so I would be interested to know.
Greetings,
Thomas

nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

A solid state drive (SSD) won't fail mechanically....no mechanicals. But If you think it's more reliable any other way, you're asking for another disaster to strike.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT ENTRUST YOUR VALUABLE DATA to ***ANY*** single storage device or media or cloud or whatever! You MUST have backups of your data, even multiple backups.
There are lots of ways to accomplish this.

Angel Star Photography Loc: Tacoma, WA

Well said! Backup! Backup! Backup!

It should be noted that while it is possible to recover data from a failed SSD, it is often more difficult and problematic. With the inexpensive cost of storage and the software to backup data, there is absolutely no excuse to not perform regular backups of data which one deems important. The simplest is to make an additional copy on a second, and possibly, third storage device.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Solid state drives are OK but you would be well advised to store all your files in multiple places. Different media would also be a good idea. Redundancy in backup helps mitigate the eventual failure of all storage media. If your storage fails you're out of luck unless you have the data duplicated somewhere.

True archiving requires maintenance. Replacement of storage containers that fail or get near their mean time to failure. That involves copying of the data to new media and verification to ensure that the copying process does not corrupt the data.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

DVDs are dinosaurs. And they are definitely not permanent storage media.
The DVDs produced commercially are made by etching a metal surface on a disk. The home-written DVDs are made by burning holes in an organic layer on a disk. The metal surface has a much better longevity than the organic layer, which can degrade naturally with time.

Not only that, but the DVD does not hold enough data to make it a good medium for archives. A DVD can hold 4-5 GBytes of data, which is only a few photo files from some of the modern cameras. My photopile currently takes 1.2 TBytes. I would have to have more than 300 DVDs to hold my data. And of course, just shuffling through that many disks to find something is a chore I would not look forward to.

Remember also, that it's not only your photos that you have to archive. It's everything. Your word processor files, your spreadsheets, your emails, your program configuration files....... Basically everything in your computer.