My external hard drive crashed. I keep getting i/o failure messages. What's the best (or cheapest) way to do a data recovery of the drive?
I'm just letting you know. Truth hurts I guess. If your data is worth professional recovery, pay for it. If not, oh well.
If its a drive in an external chassis try taking the drive out and connecting it as a secondary drive Maybe it's the chassis that is giving problems
if the disk is still spinning and its a corrupt file or two stopping it from booting. you can try pulling it with this http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0249962 otherwise i think best buy may be able to provide it not sure price or what. just depends how much value you have on the data. if the drive is not spinning or you hear clicking sounds, data recovery may be in the thousands of dollars to attempt with no guarantee
(random guess, an older Seagate external drive?) My amateur "Holiday Inn" knowledge - if its the chassis itself bugging out its a decent bet you're safe. If its the hard drive ITSELF its probably bricked and yeah you're screwed. If its JUST the casing and chassis itself bugging out, you just break open the external casing to pull out the hard drive in it, and load it into another usb enclosure or in a usb drive adapter as mentioned. Or hook it up internally in the pc as a secondary "slave" drive. I had hd clicking sounds and all that with an external drive. I did that and the drive still works like normal, all the data still there.
Have HDs gotten so portable and full of space that it has made multiple internal HDs that require a "slave" setting obsolete? People don't have multiple internal HDs anymore?
unless your computer is more than a decade old you don't have to deal with any master/slave IDE crap.
You could try pulling it from the enclosure and use a USB adapter to connect it and see if you can get anything from it. You could try that old trick that surprisingly I've seen work: get it cold (fridge, for example) then try to access. 3rd party data recovery software has to be able to 'see' the drive to work, so if you can see it in Disk Management you might have a shot. Beyond that, you're looking at $$$ for some of the last resort data recovery places. haha
Showing the age of my setup.... If you're not playing the latest computer games or a graphic designer using a PC (Sacrilege) you can really get away with having a very old computer that suits your needs (p*rn, pirating movies/music and browsing the internet). Never realized/Didn't remember you don't have to do the whole master/slave thing with SATA drives, even though I have a IDE/SATA mix of drives myself.
If you're having trouble retrieving data from the drive, I've used a utility called Copy It Anyway that has saved more than a few irreplaceable files. http://chakan.on.neobee.net/download.html
As I tried to indicate I'm not a high techie comp wiz, I still roll with XP proudly but I put quotes on "slave" for a reason just in case. (NO I dont/didnt have to set a jumper pin or anything, thank goodness. Sata hookup)
That's the plan, only its a (slightly) newer SATA drive, and I don't have a cable. There is WAAAAY too much internet p*rn to have to save any of it locally. No issue here... Newer Seagate. And the last one I ever buy. The drive is spinning, I'm thinking its the chassis. It's mostly my mp3 collection. Ten years of music stored on there. Not critical, but not something I want to start over with. Same here. As a last resort, I'll try this. Good enough? I do need a new external drive for all those noteworthy CaseyH posts. I'm thinking a 1.4mb floppy will be enough space.
ah another u mad post. Congrats on the butt hurt. next step, learn how to use a computer. (fyi 1.44 MB would be enough to store every single word of text I've ever type on clutchfans, so thanks)
