Knackered external drive
 

My distraught son phoned me to report that his fairly new Seagate external 2 tb drive had broken and he had lost all access to around 20,000 pictures he had taken this year, He has been told that drive heads are broken and to repair would cost over £1000. A specialist job requiring a clean room.

This is all above my pay scale so what's to be done? Anyone help?

Thanks, David


OLD THREAD BUT SUPPLEMENTART QUESTION

Ouch. First thing we used to try is taking the controller from a working drive and putting it in the broken one, if that's even possible nowadays. Obviously you need a working drive so the chances of this being any use are practically zero.

When you say fairly new, how old is it ? The warranty would be at least 2 years.

As to recovering the photos, their is plenty of hard drive data recovery software out there where you can recover all of your files from a drive that isn't working. All your files will still be there, it just sounds like a kn@ckered head that can't read them. £1,000 to repair it lol, someone is having a laugh. What did it cost originally ? I presume it's just a basic 2TB external hard drive ?

Thanks Guys,

I have asked James for more info but I think drive is only a few months old. Of course he wants the stuff on the drive back, not just a fresh empty drive.

Keep me posted please.

David

How computer savvy is he? Or does he know someone who is? He will need to try a data recovery tool downloaded off the web should be some free ones if he looks hard enough. I've used these with mixed success, it will all depend on just how knackered the drive is.

If all else fails the only way to get his photos back will be to go to a data recovery company and he should be able to find one who can retrieve the files for half what he has been quoted. It all depends what they are worth to him to get back.

yup mine broke lost all my pictures from year 2000 to present bloody gutted.

yeah also seen could be up to 1k + so thought no thanks sad but got over it now only pictures

The trick is to find an identical donor drive

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/For-Data-r...AAAOSwQItTzioA

Interesting vids worth noting.

I too recently have lost 2 usb drives full of photos (starting not to trust the durability of these external drives). It is gutting and are more than just photos esp as they are for business and there is only so many backup drives I can have.

Luckily free software did an acceptable job. Had to leave it running for two days and a night ha but hey I was relieved at the result.

Those external drives use the cheapest drives available and shouldnt be your only backup media.

Thank you very much indeed for those links, most interesting.

In fact I phoned James and asked him to look out for this info which I sent. I asked him if drive was making an odd noise but he didn't think so although man in repair shop said it was :Suspiciou

But here is the really odd thing. James had borrowed another hard drive from his mate to do some more backup but as soon as he started to back stuff up it froze his Windows 10 laptop. But James also has a MAC and using the drive in the MAC was fine. So could there be a problems with laptop using external drive/s??

His next step is to try the knackered Seagate in the MAC and see if it works. All seems very odd to me :eek:

Any additional observations?

David

People here talking about controller boards and donor drives seem to be forgetting that it might only be the electronics in the external caddy which are at fault, and not the disk itself at all. In my experience this is far more likely in fact, particularly if the drive is less than 2 years old.

The first thing to try then, if this doesn't turn out to be a problem with the laptop as DL's latest posts suggest, would be to try and mount the drive internally in a PC or externally but with a different external drive adapter cable or caddy, and see if it works that way. Maplin or PCWorld would be sure to have something suitable at fairly reasonable cost (safely under £30).

The seegate drive only work from within a seagate caddy (unless they've changed something recently). So it will be worth trying to source an identical unit to try swapping over bits.

That's news to me. Every external drive I've ever opened up had bog-standard IDE or SATA connectors, including at least one Seagate (admittedly a few years back now, but not sure why they'd go to the bother of manufacturing drives with non-standard connectors specially for their portable line when they must produce 50x as many standard ones for internal fitting).

It's an encryption issue rather than physically capable.

Once you've nuked the partition and reformatted it will work.

Is there non computer guru speak version of this?

David

The external enclosure has a controller card which will encrypt the data before it is written back to the disk. Meaning any data written on the drive can only be read by (possibly only) that enclosure.

- You'll have to to some digging to see if yours does that

If you were to pull a working enclosure apart and shove the drive in a conventional PC, the only way it would be usable is if you wipe it first - in your situation not the best way to go.

So to eliminate the enclosure failing & to have identical donor parts for the drive, you need to pick up another of your enclosures.

How did you get on when using the drive (via USB) on a mac?

Cloud storage FTW

Crazy not to nowadays, no better use for other peoples computers than storing your ****.

becomes expensive when you have TB's of storage though :)

OK thanks - I can almost understand that :thumb:

I spoke to James last night but the shop that has the drive is taking its time to put it back together and return it to him. James is Dublin based but currently touring Ireland with his band and then off to Rio to pursue his new interest in photography so the shop's slowness is a pain.

I meant to ask if there is any merit in burning pics to a disc or is storage capacity too limited? At least you could spread the risk of loss over several discs, not just one drive?

Depending on the volume of files he needs to back up, a dropbox or similar would work as an additional backup to the disk.

https://photos.google.com Unlimited original photo storage.

Its not original quality Jack, when you use the unlimited option, all photos are scaled down slightly. If you want to keep the original sizes then its limited to a specific storage size, cant remember what, but its something like 1 or 2GB iirc.

But yea the point is you'd be crazy not to use cloud storage plus any mechanical or disc storage backups as they will eventually fail. I used to backup a lot of mp3 albums onto dvdr's, big mistake, they don't last long at all when stored.

Now I backup to 4 sources, 1 on another HDD in my PC, 1 to external HDD (both for quick access), apps and bits n pieces to a large ramstick and finally the whole lot to different cloud backups.

^^^ If you really value your data do what he does.^^^

We use SSDs for the extra performance in our kit so for critical data we're backing up to 1) internal mirrored HDDs every night, 2) a USB external drive 3 days a week, 3) a NAS stack in another building on the property every weekend and 4) we cycle an offsite USB portable set over to the mother-in-law's at the other side of the country every month. Plus extra capacity cloud storage for photos.

Call me paranoid but I've had too many supposedly 'premium brand' hard disk drive failures over the years to believe the quoted "2.5 million hours mean time between failure" spiel any longer.

Update
 

Spoke to James just now and he now has knackered drive back from shop.

He put this in his MAC and is able to retrieve data taking a long time as he has about 1.5 tb of data to copy across. Circa 29,000 pics

I suggested the free Google option but he tells me that Google will not accept raw data.

Anyway he is a happy bunny :thumb:

David

I'm confused :: so it wasn't broken ??

You're confused :rolleyes:

All I can say it that when plugged into a laptop everything froze. When plugged into a MAC it works.

So dodgy laptop, dodgy USB drive connections??? Sorry don't know

David

Just keep the data in two places. Very unlikely that both will fail at the same time.

Glad you got it sorted