Recovering data from external harddrive

[The Fugitive]

So I bought a 2tb western digital external hard drive. Used it for about 3 months and it died. I hear a little noise that it's trying to read and then it would stop. I took it apart and connected directly to my computer to transfer the data off it but it will not read. Any one tried getting the data off of their external hard drive? Any ideas? thanks

[billofrights]

http://www.datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

Go there, find out which sound it is first, then report back. From what you're describing it's likely the read head arm failing, probably the motor.

[ldivinag]

when i worked at IT, i had a dooheekee that connects to IDE or SATA drives and has a USB on the other end.

every single drive i take out of machine connects to this and 9/10 i can recover drives.

but if they are physical deader than disco, only a place like DRIVE SAVERS can take the drive apart, take out the platters, then put the platters into another drive chassis, all in a CLEAN ROOM environment.

good luck...

[ocabj]

If I get a physical hard drive failure with no backup or redundancy, I just roll up in a fetal position in the corner of my office and cry.

[the86d]

If you reboot can you see it if it is plugged into the mainboard via the BIOS?

Does it show up under Disk management in Win?

Does it say it needs to be formatted in Windows (I just assumed Windows)?

[the86d]

Since we went stale here...
"Data that you don't have at least two copies of is data you don't care about."

[billofrights]

I figure if OP didn't spend any more time on it, I wouldn't.

[high_revs]

i had this happen to me. there was a trick someone suggested which was to put the drive into the freezer. mine was too toasted by then. i was crying when i had to pay $600 for recovery since i didn't have the redundancy (my other drive went kaput too!). i needed some financial data from the drive. so now, i'm quad-redundant.

http://lifehacker.com/5515337/save-a-failed-hard-drive-in-your-freezer-redux

[moond0ggie]

Look for a low level disk mgmt. program to sense for HDDs that have gone offline, unreadable or different format.
MS diskpart dL & install then run these Command-Line Options
beside the freezer trick, you could obtain another HDD of the same & try using its electronics board on the faulty drive.

[the86d]

I have swapped electronics to revive a drive one time, but the freezer never worked because it started to get warm before I could pull data.

It was a simpler time when you could just beat drives on the desk w/ power applied until they started spinning again...