Ryan

[Chaplin]

Don't know if you've ever encountered this, but I had a hard drive (180GB Seagate) that I had put into one of those cases to make it an external firewire drive. It had worked fine for a long time, but then I made my first and only purchase of a single song from MSN. I took the song and moved it to my hard drive, and then the next day, the drive took a dump on me. I don't know if it's because of that mp3, but I'm suspicious.

I think it's simply a mechanical issue, but I believe the data is still there. I've been told the best thing to do is buy the same exact drive, replace the motherboard with the new one, take my stuff off and move the motherboard back to the other drive. Seems complicated, but probably less expensive than going to a data retrieval place.

To give you an idea, I had something like 130GB worth of music, something like 26,000 songs on the drive.

Do you know of any other solutions?

 

[Ryanwb]

I would advise to try Seagate's diagnostic tool, you may be able to recover
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

As far as your solution, I have never tried that route but whatever you can do to get your stuff back is worth it.

Have you also tried setting it up as a slave, disconnecting it from the Firewire case and plugging it into the IDE (or sata) connection and see if you can access it that way?

 

[Chaplin]

I would advise to try Seagate's diagnostic tool, you may be able to recover
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

As far as your solution, I have never tried that route but whatever you can do to get your stuff back is worth it.

Have you also tried setting it up as a slave, disconnecting it from the Firewire case and plugging it into the IDE (or sata) connection and see if you can access it that way?

Diagnostic tool did not work, it seemed to be an issue with just accessing the drive. I did not try plugging it into the IDE, but I did put it in another case and tried it that way--same thing happened.

 

[Chaz]

I had a HDD is a case that failed. It started saying USB device not recognized when I plugged it in.

I installed it inside the case via IDE and it is working fine.

I would definitely recommend trying that before giving up on the drive. Listen to see if the drive spins up at all and if the system BIOS recognizes the drive when connected to IDE.


Changing out the electronics can be tricky.

 

[Chaplin]

I had a HDD is a case that failed. It started saying USB device not recognized when I plugged it in.

I installed it inside the case via IDE and it is working fine.

I would definitely recommend trying that before giving up on the drive. Listen to see if the drive spins up at all and if the system BIOS recognizes the drive when connected to IDE.


Changing out the electronics can be tricky.

I hear ya, that's why I want to exhaust all my other options--I'm definitely not looking to give up on the drive. It's got A LOT of data on it.

 

[nathan]

Ah man that really sucks. It's just not worth it to put hard drives in enclosures. I say that having had the experience of two drives failing in them. You've probably had people tell you this, but it really pays to back everything up. I have my music collection stored on about 20 DVDs, which may seem clumsy, but if I suffered another hard drive failure I would be extremely thankful to have them.

 

[CardFan67]

I had a HDD is a case that failed. It started saying USB device not recognized when I plugged it in.

I installed it inside the case via IDE and it is working fine.

Changing out the electronics can be tricky.

I second this suggestion... I would connect it to one of your internal straps even if you have to temporarily disconnect a CD or DVD rom... I have had much more luck leaving my primary drive solo and keeping the jumpers on the questionable drive in the single drive or master position... Connect the questionable drive to the second ide strap with no other drives... In the case of large drives I have had to buy an equivalent or larger drive and slave it off my primary to transfer the information from the questionable drive to...

In my worst case scenario I had to take apart the bad drive connect is as mentioned above and manually spin it... the problem seemed to be that the mechanics that started the spin were weak... once I got it spinning I just retrieved the information and continuously as possible... It was only a 40 gig so it did not take too long...

My solution for the future of my storage was to buy a 350 gig drive and network it, now all three of my computers back up to that drive...

 

[Chaplin]

The thing is, I have 2 external enclosures. I did some swapping, put the working HD in the other case and vice versa. Everything worked fine, so it definitely wasn't the external enclosure.