Never trust external hard drives (edit) HELP ME PLEASE

[c money 88 05]

I'm on my phone now because of this. All my music/pics/online files, gone. Ms office 03/07 got to be reinstalled now. And the warrenty just went up so ifit can be fixed, outta my pocket. anyone know any place that could retrieve my files? Any help is greatly appreciated.





edit- ok, so after not being able to get the trial runs working, I took my hard drive up to geek squad at best buy, just hoping for anything. They said it was"too far gone" and it would have to be shipped off, where it would cost me up to $1600 to get it fixed.

Now I'm not sure if they're trying to get me to spend more money, and I've heard some stories about geek squad so I'm not counting that as theend-all solution,

BUT what else could I do.
I really don't wanna buy the software or download the software, and then it work like the trial which can't seem to recover my drive since my computerdoesn't recognize it.
Can I get some kind of word one way or the other on how the full software for those programs would work, or something?




Thanks.

 

[teymur85]

had the same problem with my external drive. Look for a software called GetDataBack. Either buy it or download on torrent. Worked like a charm. I was able toget my documents, files, movies, but the drive itself was bricked.

 

[c money 88 05]

how exactly did that work?

I'm not the most technical person, and I don't wanna mess anything up. Can I buy the software at best buy, put it on my comp, and it'll do it'sthing with the hard drive just plugged in?



if I was to buy another hard drive, could it send the files from the one hard drive to the new one, becuase all the files won't fit on my comp otherwise.

 

[xxlil ryanxx]

that sucks i was planning to buy an external harddrive to store the stuff thats on my old computer.

 

[rawsheed]

I'm gonna buy one but I'm still going to back up my files on DVDs

Gotta be extra cautious

 

[c money 88 05]

Originally Posted by xxLiL RYANxx

that sucks i was planning to buy an external harddrive to store the stuff thats on my old computer.

you still can, just do what sheeds said and back ALL of that !$!% up. ALL OF IT.

like I said in my second post, I'm gonna probably get another one, simply because I have no real other choice, but still....

but can anyone help me out with that software that was brought up earlier? getdataback?

 

[mrchery]

external hrd drives are easy to use u just have to remember the orignal folders

 

[lauk4kicks]

ughhh

what brand ext hd do you have?

 

[stick]

If you wanna fix it, try SpinRite.

My 500GB external also broke on me today. I had so much stuff on there.

 

[mez 0ne]

Never trust ANY hard drive period, whether external or internal (I learned the hard way).

Just make sure you have duplicates of your important stuff, and always keep your photos on CD Roms.

 

[offbad]

iunno man, no problems with my seagate so far. which brand did you have?

 

[flyingemu05]

did your driving make a "clicking" sound before it went out?

 

[quest uno]

i back up my external drives just in case. ever since my comp crashed 2 years ago i've been paranoid about losing my music/pics so i have 3 external drivesnow

 

[Original Playa Records]

You can usually hear when a HD is about to die. All hard drives die though, I've had more internal failures than external. I hate having laptop HD'sfail, that's why I'm going to invest in an external. I was thinking about building a custom box and just that as my "external" or mediaservier.

 

[bishoptwo2]

how do hard drives break down?
and how do you prevent that from happening?

 

[c money 88 05]

I have a 160 GB western digital that I bought last black friday to store some quick music while my cousin was in town.




I was JUST looking at hard drives last week too, thinking about getting a 500 GB or maybe that 1TB hard drive so I could use the 160 as a backup drive.





I tried downloading a version of that get data back software(FAT version, I'm thinking my drive was a FAT16 drive?) but I didn't see where I couldchoose my non-recognized drive to be retrieved.
Since it was just the trial version, would the actual version do any better? I don't wanna spend the $70-$80 on the software and it can't find thedrive.





I'll give that spinrite a try too. Thanks.

 

[c money 88 05]

Originally Posted by QUEST UNO

i back up my external drives just in case. ever since my comp crashed 2 years ago i've been paranoid about losing my music/pics so i have 3 external drives now

sounding like me right now.

[table][tr][td][/td] [td]
did your driving make a "clicking" sound before it went out?
[/td] [/tr][/table]
I have no idea, I was sleep when it happened. It worked fine thursday night when I was listening to music that's on the external, but friday Iwoke up wanting to burn a CD right quick and that's when I found out my hard drive was messing up. It use to always make some kind of sound every 5minutes(I heard this was natural though) and eventhough it's still "on" now, the sound is long gone.




and maybe I'm reading it wrong or just don't understand(which is completely possible) but that spinrite doesn't seem like it would be able to helpme too much, since my hard drive would have to be recognized by windows, and my hard drive can't be recognized.

 

[c money 88 05]

ok, so after not being able to get the trial runs working, I took my hard drive up to geek squad at best buy, just hoping for anything. They said it was"too far gone" and it would have to be shipped off, where it would cost me up to $1600 to get it fixed.

Now I'm not sure if they're trying to get me to spend more money, and I've heard some stories about geek squad so I'm not counting that as theend-all solution,

BUT what else could I do.
I really don't wanna buy the software or download the software, and then it work like the trial which can't seem to recover my drive since my computerdoesn't recognize it.
Can I get some kind of word one way or the other on how the full software for those programs would work, or something?




Thanks.

 

[stlnikesquad]

Sometimes with external drives just the casing goes bad... and you have to be able to remove the HDD &+(Hard Drive) from the case to know for sure if its abad case or the HDD itself but that is normally not an easy thing to do and I think it probably voids the warranty on most of them. As for the Geek Squaddata/disaster recovery can get pricey and the quote they gave you is sufficient. In all honesty there is a test for HDD called the Bards test and just runningthe test on HDD costs 250 $ it basically will tell ontrack what type of data recovery you will need and then they will charge you accordingly, for tier 1 2 or3 prices. The software data recovery programs work pretty well sometimes but in your case since the HDD wont spin up you wouldn't be able to use them.

 

[bishoptwo2]

there must be something software companies use that we're not aware of, that can retrieve data from dead hd casing
because im sure the data still remains on the disk
maybe im not computer literate enough to know..
keep this thread bumpin

 

[ofluo]

I can't wait for those SSD hard drives to become common....Solid State Hard Drives..no moving parts, but the max is 64GB right now.

 

[quik1987]

I was just thinking about getting the western digital 500 gb for my macbook too. So you recommend against it?

 

[lauk4kicks]

ya'll making me paranoid now. I feel like I have to BURN everything to dvds now. But i dont have time currently

 

[stlnikesquad]

well the thing that can be done about those externals is well they take them outta the case and slave them up and they work it happened for me a couple oftimes when i was in the geeksquad. Now when we get into like data recovery that ontrack does its not all software based because they can pull data off of a HDDthats been cooked and damaged physically. By takeing out those moving pieces and getting the data straight off the platters and what not. Another thing i hadsome luck with is freezing hard drives and it works long enough to get the data off of the HDD thats failing.

 

[tonystarks2984]

Had that happen once. 120gb worth of reggae was gone (Months on mirc..ugghh). But i found some dude on ebay (For about $60) to do data recovery and goteverything back. Ever since then I have two back ups of the reggae stored in a container.

On a side note..alot of ppl dont stop their hard drives before unplugging them. It can cause data failure as well, that little button in the taskbar that sayssafely remove hardware...use it.