Anyone do External Hard Drive Recovery

[Guest WyattEarp]

i have an iomega eGoEncrypt hard drive that failed on me about a year ago. All it does when i plug it in, is start making a clicking noise, but won't recognize and I can't read.

Is there anyone on here who could possibly recover the data by switching out the head or something to another working hard drive? This pretty much had a lot of my photography and some other things that are irreplaceable.

I've kept the drive and it's been in a storage tote, so I don't know what, if anything can be recovered, but might be worth a shot.

I think it's a 500GB HD.

Iomega wouldn't warranty it even though it failed before I had it a year, and they wouldn't recover any of the data for me either. It just quit working on it's own, never dropped or anything.

[Guest nicemac]

Man, I feel for ya'. Iomega has been a pain to deal with since the early days. Their ZIP drives used to get the "click of death" that was the end of the road for the drive and any media inserted into it…

Anyway, if it is clicking, your best bet (and possibly only hope) is DriveSavers. They are very expensive, but can likely get back everything on the drive.

[Jonnin]

there are places where you can have someone pull the data off the platters, or there used to be, but it is extremely expensive. Or you can try to do it yourself by buying an identical unit, taking them apart, and swapping just the media disks into the new unit. This will NOT LAST -- the dust and such in the unit after opening it will ruin it fast, but you may recover some data that way. It depends on how valuale the data was vs how much you want to spend, but most folks just throw the drive away & learn to back things up.

[MacGyver]

Was the drive encrypted? If so, you're almost guaranteed to have lost your data in a way that is not going to lend itself to being recovered.

Encryption is a great idea, but without a sound backup strategy in place can be really dangerous. An encrypted drive, as a general rule depends on the integrity of the whole volume. If some of the volume becomes corrupted, as it does when heads start skipping (that clicking sound) then the decryption engine won't be able to decrypt the data as the stream coming into the engine is corrupt.

[JimmyMac483]

I hope that you can figure out a way to get you data back. You have reminded me that I need to back up my external. It has not been done for a while.

[wewoapsiak]

Don't know if this will work for you, but this worked for me twice.

Put it in a freezer for a decent time, 5 hrs or more. Then wrap it so it'll stay cold while you hook it up.

I know it's but it's worked for an external HDD and an Internal.

[Guest nysos]

External drives are no different from internal drives, just an enclosure on them and a usb doggle attached to the back and depending on the size an AC power adapter.

The problem could also be the controller board for the usb doggle and not the drive itself. I would suggest removing the drive from the enclosure and hooking it up to a machine via its native sata connection. I would also avoid the freezer recommendation as it can harm the platters if you decide to end up sending it to a place like drive savers.

If you can get the drive to be detected in the bios then there is a good utility I use that has been pretty good about recovering data from failing drives. It is setup to repeatedly try and read the same sector over and over for a duration, and even try reading it in reverse before it moves on to the next area. Sometimes you get partial files, but unlike a conventional file transfer method - the second windows hits an error it just quits, even if there is plenty of good data AFTER the point in the drive in which the error is encountered.

If you can find a drive of the exact same make and firmware revision on the board, you can try swapping the platters yourself - but this type of work is supposed to be done in a clean room, 1 spec of dust on the platter can ruin it. If the data is important you may as well just pay drive savers to do it.

[G27]

Don't know if this will work for you, but this worked for me twice.

Put it in a freezer for a decent time, 5 hrs or more. Then wrap it so it'll stay cold while you hook it up.

I know it's but it's worked for an external HDD and an Internal.

Yup.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Yes hooking up the raw drive to a computer would be good to try.

The Newer Tech Universal Drive Adapter is a wonderful inexpensive swiss army knife for temporarily connecting random raw drives to a Mac or PC--

NewerTech U3NVSPATA Universal Drive Adapter USB... in stock at OWC

Sometimes a problem-- if an external drive enclosure's firmware has written a funky volume definition or file directory structure on the disk, which the computer can't recognize when attached direct without the external drive firmware interpreting the situation.

Your Mac MAY have better luck recognizing this drive than the PC, if the drive isn't completely hosed.

That hard drive freezing trick reminds me of the ancient ritual of baking aged studio master tapes.

[Guest WyattEarp]

Man, I feel for ya'. Iomega has been a pain to deal with since the early days. Their ZIP drives used to get the "click of death" that was the end of the road for the drive and any media inserted into it…

Anyway, if it is clicking, your best bet (and possibly only hope) is DriveSavers. They are very expensive, but can likely get back everything on the drive.

yeah, i'll never buy another Iomega anything. I have a 1 TB Seagate, and a 2 TB seagate now. love both 'em, but I have started keeping a hard copy on disc of everything.

Was the drive encrypted? If so, you're almost guaranteed to have lost your data in a way that is not going to lend itself to being recovered.

Encryption is a great idea, but without a sound backup strategy in place can be really dangerous. An encrypted drive, as a general rule depends on the integrity of the whole volume. If some of the volume becomes corrupted, as it does when heads start skipping (that clicking sound) then the decryption engine won't be able to decrypt the data as the stream coming into the engine is corrupt.

no it wasn't encrypted.

Don't know if this will work for you, but this worked for me twice.

Put it in a freezer for a decent time, 5 hrs or more. Then wrap it so it'll stay cold while you hook it up.

I know it's but it's worked for an external HDD and an Internal.

tried that already, didn't work.

Yes hooking up the raw drive to a computer would be good to try.

The Newer Tech Universal Drive Adapter is a wonderful inexpensive swiss army knife for temporarily connecting random raw drives to a Mac or PC--

NewerTech U3NVSPATA Universal Drive Adapter USB... in stock at OWC

Sometimes a problem-- if an external drive enclosure's firmware has written a funky volume definition or file directory structure on the disk, which the computer can't recognize when attached direct without the external drive firmware interpreting the situation.

Your Mac MAY have better luck recognizing this drive than the PC, if the drive isn't completely hosed.

That hard drive freezing trick reminds me of the ancient ritual of baking aged studio master tapes.

may look into that Lester, thanks. no luck on the MAC recognizing it, tried it on both my macbook pro and imac, adn neither one did.

[BryanP]

From what you describe you're probably going to have to either pay for a professional recovery service or let it go. Depends on how much the data is worth to you.

My rule on anything important is it has to live on two drives. My wife is an amateur photographer, and I have her putting all her pictures (and she takes a LOT of them) on her laptop, and then backing up her photos folder to an external drive.

If this is your business I'd recommend making a backup copy to another drive that you then sync to an online backup service like Carbonite. That way you have it in 3 locations, one of which is an off-site backup. That's probably where I'll be going next with my wife's stuff.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I don't use Carbonite, but have a Netfirms web domain where I back up important stuff offsite. And the company's backup server as well.

Maybe you can trust carbonite more than a for-hire web domain-- However, Netfirms is generally pretty good about maintaining their servers, but about a year ago they went thru some system changes and managed to delete a bunch of files on my virtual server. Had an account with em for maybe 8 years or more, and that is the only incident where they messed up my server. Just sayin, even cloud storage isn't guaranteed foolproof.

I'm not mad at netfirms for that one screwup, but it was just a good reminder that nothing is a good place to put all yer eggs in one basket.

[Jonnin]

Thumb drives are not a bad choice, they are getting huge and you can fit what, 32 gigs on a fairly cheap one? It may take 10 of them for a big drive, but they do not take up much space or cost much and I have yet to see one fail, my first one still works (128 MB from way way back).

[Karnage]

External drives are no different from internal drives, just an enclosure on them and a usb doggle attached to the back and depending on the size an AC power adapter.

The problem could also be the controller board for the usb doggle and not the drive itself. I would suggest removing the drive from the enclosure and hooking it up to a machine via its native sata connection.

Do this. I have used a program called get data back to get information from hard drives that have suffered mechanical failures and drives that cannot be detected by an operating system. It usually works. I think that you should be able to retrieve at least some of your data from the drive. Send me a PM and I will give you more information.