My external hard drive has suddenly stopped working. Is it possible to recover the data?
The drive is a 2TB HP SimpleSave that I acquired in late 2011. I've been using it as my primary media storage and as a backup location for important files.
Today, I was trying to put a new album in my music folder and it refused to copy it from my laptop to the external drive. The alert window said it was because of an I/O error. I've tried it with other files, and checked the cable connection, but the drive refuses to write new data or allow old data to be copied from it. My computer recognizes the hard drive just fine, it's just that the drive won't cooperate.
I've got all of the extremely important stuff backed up, but I'd still hate to lose 1.75 TB of data. Is there a way to salvage the drive?
Posted May 30, 2013, 2:48 AM UTC
17
Pull it out of the external enclosure, and hook it up to a desktop directly. If you don't have a desktop to use, you can order one of these. It the drive behaves normally, it was just the enclosure and you can order a new one.
If it still acts wonky, there is software out there both free and commercial that you can try. If the drive is going through physical failure and your stuff is really important to you I'd suggest you immediately turn it off and send it in for data recovery. My usual place charges anywhere from $450 to $950 and has a two week turn around time.
Thanks. I'm hoping it's just the enclosure... I've replaced those before with no problem. This is a different model, but still, it can't be too hard.
Just in case, what free software would you recommend? I definitely don't have the money to take it in for repair.
I use ddrescue myself which will make an image of the drive. It comes with various live CD/USB versions of Linux, but is all command line. You can [this] (http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/) which is a bootable CD along with ddrescue. You can also try Recuva but it's not really for failing drives.
Just to clarify... sometimes these drives use proprietary controllers to read the data on the drive so replacing the enclosure may not work... though most new drives do not do this. As far as the software part goes... it depends on the problem. If the drive has actually failed, I do not recommend using any software on it as you could damage the drive further. Considering the I/O error, this is either a controller or actual read/write problem which would not be a good idea to run software.