hard drive faiiure

[stefanpankow]

my maxtor one touch external hard drive has failed i need to know how and where i can recover data especially my photos, can anyone help me ? seagate wanted about £1000 to recover data

[PaulMontgomery]

How has it failed? Is it totally dead? If its spinning and recognised by the computer, but appears empty, one of the many file recovery programmes might help.

[stefanpankow]

not spinning, making a beeping sound, and not recognised by any computer

[flake]

The only thing I can suggest is that you open it up and try either plugging it into the PC directly, this means opening the PC case & depends how technical you are, or you could buy a new HDD caddy for about £20 and hope that the fault lies with the power supply or the interface in the case.
The easiest thing to do is to pull the HDD out of the case and take it to a local PC shop (an independant would be best) and have them check it for you.

If it has failed sadly it's going to cost a lot of money to retreive the data, as the unit needs to be rebuilt in a clean room by hand.

[KeithT]

That's a lot of money for recovery. If you have a local computer engineer in your area give him or her a ring to see if they can help. Next time, buy a Western Digital. I have my WD3200JB for a couple of years now without issue.

[PaulMontgomery]

If its not spinning, try giving at quick jerk around its axis of rotation (if you're not confident of which way this is, don't do it) that can sometimes encourage them to spin up.

[OldBoy]

Originally Posted by stefanpankow

not spinning, making a beeping sound, and not recognised by any computer

External hard drives don't make a bleeping sound but the computer does. This suggests the PC can see the drive but is unable to mount it hence no drive letter in your drive lists. Each hard drive has a circuit board on the outside and it may be this that needs repairing or replacing. As already suggested take to a local PC repair shop who may be able to fix it for about £100 or less.

[flake]

I think advising anyone on a particular make of HDD is a fools errand, especially when it's only from experience of a couple of years! I have a 30GB Maxtor still going strong after 10 years and it's been spun virtually every day all day.

If anything I'd avoid Western Digital like the plague, one data recovery company rates them as the very worst drive for reliability as they see more failures than any other.

The truth is that all of them are much of a muchness as far as reliability goes, if you want to get anal check out the MTBF figures (Mean Time Between Failures) but this is only an indication. If it's just for simple data storage then choose the slowest RPM you can find (5400) for the longest life.

The other truth is that HDD storage is so cheap now that you can afford to buy a spare & use it back your data up so that when the inevitable failure happens you'll still have a working one. Products like the Sharkoon quickport USB make backup very easy.

[stefanpankow]

thanks to you all. ngoing to take it to computer shop for them to assess it

[KeithT]

Originally Posted by flake

I think advising anyone on a particular make of HDD is a fools errand, especially when it's only from experience of a couple of years! I have a 30GB Maxtor still going strong after 10 years and it's been spun virtually every day all day.

If anything I'd avoid Western Digital like the plague, one data recovery company rates them as the very worst drive for reliability as they see more failures than any other.

The truth is that all of them are much of a muchness as far as reliability goes, if you want to get anal check out the MTBF figures (Mean Time Between Failures) but this is only an indication. If it's just for simple data storage then choose the slowest RPM you can find (5400) for the longest life.

The other truth is that HDD storage is so cheap now that you can afford to buy a spare & use it back your data up so that when the inevitable failure happens you'll still have a working one. Products like the Sharkoon quickport USB make backup very easy.

Hmmm! If you wouldn't advise anyone to buy into a certain make of EHDD, why are you advising them to avoid a particular make like the plague? Don't get that logic, Flake.