[lust4speed]

Totally my fault, went to the trouble to purchase a 3T external hard drive a year or so ago to back up my data, and it worked so good that I ended up relying on it as as standard storage device.

My current problem is the computer no longer recognizes or sees the drive. Happened slowly over a few days and I was able to purchase another external drive and get the family photos and videos off it. I was in the process of transferring the car photos over when it stopped. It would come to life for awhile, and then disappear, and then finally never came back. It still holds about 12 years of car shows and drag racing I would very much like to recover. Maybe the worse loss is the tech photos and articles I had accumulated over the years.

I had read that the weak point in these Seagate Backup Plus drives was the power supply / adapter so I purchased a kit to bypass the bottom adapter, but no improvement. With either, the computer beeps when I plug in the drive, but doesn't light up or have the computer acknowledge it. I also wired the drive directly into the computer bay as a slave unit, and the computer didn't recognize anything being there.

I did try Disk Drill, and the drive came to life for a few minutes, but not long enough to accomplish anything before disappearing for the last time. So at this point, is there anything left to try before sending the drive off to a profession company? And if that is my option, what companies have provided a reasonable and fair service?

[GTOLiam]

I feel your pain as this has happened to me years ago and I lost a bunch of stuff without knowing anything about data recovery services. Call this place it seems to have some great reviews...

http://www.yelp.com/biz/300-data-recovery-los-angeles

[lust4speed]

I talked to them. They seem to be about the best choice, and was going with them. I was a little disappointed that they kicked the price up an additional $100 to $400 when they found out the drive was larger than a 2T. Didn't matter than I had way less than a terabyte of data on it - price is on the drive size.

So sitting on my hands at the moment while I decide whether the missing files are worth the $400. I went back and found backups to the end of 2013, so really just missing about a year and a half of Pontiac shows and projects.

[Chris65LeMans]

I'd try the drive on another computer first. My laptop is screwey about not recognizing drives or printers. The problem could be in your computer. It's cheap to try ....

[rohrt]

I don't know if the newer externals are like the older ones but you use to be able to take them apart and they just had a regular hard drive in them. The box they were in was just a simple device to convert from a serial/SATA to a USB. For the smaller boxes one it would be a laptop hard drive.


The issue is either going to be the HD itself or the USB controller box. Does the HD make noise when you plug it in? Could the connector be bad? I wonder if you could buy another external HD of the same brand and try putting you other HD in it?

[poncho-mike]

We had an issue with my son's hard drive. I think it was a Western Digital MyBook.

The hard drive will plug into any computer, but you can't open up the hard drive case, remove the hard drive, and plug it into a computer.

My son broke one of the external connectors that connected to the drive. I removed the hard drive and plugged it into my computer, but my computer wouldn't recognize it. After some investigation, I found the interface card that the USB and power plug into encrypts the data before writing it to the hard drive. If that card fails, the computer won't decrypt the data.

We tried ordering another card, but there are a variety of cards, each with a different encryption key. We screwed up and managed to destroy the data while trying to access it, so it was lost for good.

I don't know why Western Digital encrypts the data, since you can plug the external hard drive into any computer and it is recognized. It is only a problem if you try to install the hard drive in a computer without the card, or the card fails.



Mike

[65gto69]

I have been working on computers since 1987 and I can't tell my clients enough to backup your info on more than one device. (CD's, DVD's, SD Cards, Flash Drives, Thumb Drives, Tape Backup, Hard Drives, NAS Systems). These are all affordable to purchase at whatever your budget level and can be very helpful in protecting and duplicating your info.

You can never have your files copied on too many devices.

Good luck on recovering your files

Mark

[andyg]

One last thing to try before professional recovery, put the drive in a Ziploc bag, suck the air out, put in the freezer for 2-3 hours. Take it out and try it. A trick I picked up from some of my better techs that works from time to time.