Well it finally happened to me. I was overdue for an external hard drive to go. Of course I lost nothing as It's backed up in seveal places but I did lose a couple hours of work that I did this morning. I tried freezing it and trying it and dropping one end flat on the table with no results. Not a disaster as it's only a couple hours of time lost but any suggestions to attempt bringing it to life for a few minutes to copy the new files? If not it was expected and just a bit of time lost. Thanks.
I used PC Inspector Smart Recovery once with great success. It's intended for card readers, so I'm not sure if it will work on an external hard drive. But it's definitely worth a try, since it's free. If not then another one of their products, File Recovery, might work.
Posted by Les Barstow on March 28, 2007 at 7:22 PM
Is the drive dead, or just the directory structure? If the drive isn't recognized in BIOS, it's unlikely you'll be recovering anything from it without a data recovery service (which is pricey). If it's recognized and spins up, you may be able to recover it with any number of disk repair tools, or possibly offload the data by using a Linux LiveCD (I recommend Knoppix LiveCD...).
Nah... it's history! Just a lot of clicking and clacking... no recognition at all. Just found out it's within days of warrenty so I'll only lose the couple of hours work done since my last back.. not worth any expense at all. I'd like to have recovered it but it's no big deal. Before I mail back in I may give it one last good whack just to try to bring it back to life for a couple minutes!
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