Help my seagate externalhard disc has just crashed

[F11]

I've had a Seagate External hard drive for quite a time now with lots of my best shots saved on it. Tonight however, the whole thing has just crashed for no apparent reason, not loading at all on to the computer. Has anyone ever paid to get the information restored. If so, what's the average cost. I'm gutted as my son-in-law did advise me to copy some of my best images on to discs but time prevailing I haven't heeded his words of wisdom.

[ap4a]

You need to determine whether it's the hard disk or the caddie that it's in that has failed. If the caddie has died then you can buy another relatively cheaply and put the disk into that and it should work fine. Also, not loading on your computer doesn't necessarily signal the end even if it is the disk at fault, if the caddie is able to power it and the disk is just not being read by Windows then trying to access it via another operating system might help. Otherwise it could work out quite expensive to have a data recovery specialist work on it.

[Cathus]

I've not paid, but I have had a major hard drive failure. When I looked into it I found that I probably wouldn't have any change from several hundred quid.

I ended up trying several software recovery programs, none of which worked until I found one which just about recovered everything off a drive that wasn't recognised by the computer at all. It was a life saver.

The program's on my other PC (I'm in bed at the moment) & I can't recall it's name, I'll try to remember tomorrow & let you know what it's called.

In the meantime Google 'hard drive recovery software', you should find lots of programmes, man of which you can download a trial version, it will have a go & either tell you how many files it can recover or recover a small number of files & then ask you to pay for the software to recover the rest.
It won't cost you anything to try & you might be able to recover most of the stuff yourself.

Be prepared to set aside a few hours though depending on the size of the drive.

[Eyeayen]

I looked into data recovery about 10 years ago, they quoted me £350 just to look at it and tell me if any of it was salvageable. I phoned a couple of places in the UK and the price was standard.

For now though I'd take Cathus's advice above and see what you can do yourself. Good luck and let us know how you do.

[KeithT]

It's a nightmare isn't it? It is something that scares me half to death. That's why I run two external harddrives at the moment using one to back-up the other, also putting my best raws onto disc. I am also thinking of getting another external with greater capacity. I know I'm over the top with this, but the chances of all three going tits up at the same time is pretty low. I always go for Western Digital and even have one as my main computer harddrive. Good luck and by the way, Amazon UK are selling a 1TB Western Digital ehdd for under 60 quid at the moment, so worth looking at when you get sorted.

[donoreo]

Data recovery is very expensive. As advised, try to see if the is the enclosure or the drive itself that has a problem.

If it is the drive, there may be a few tricks to try. It depends on what is wrong, they may not work.

[donoreo]

Another thing....make backups of your backups

[duncan22]

Totally agree with the idea of having 2 external hard drives containing exact copies of all your work.
Looking through some of the posts on the internet hard drive failure is not uncommon.
Consider the cost of a second drive at £70 - £80 to be a good insurance policy.
What are your photographs worth and could you replace them ?

[PaulMontgomery]

If you can hear the disk spinning with your ear pressed to it and its not making any horrible rattling noises, there's a good chance its only the caddy and the disk will be O.K.

[Cathus]

F11,

the software I had success with was EaseUs Data Recovery Professional. It took 9 hours to examine the 1TB drive, found 75,000 files & recovered them over a further 8 hours.

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizardpro/