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disaster! my external hard drive took a fall! help

post #1 of 6
1/26/07 at 2:41pm
Thread Starter 
ok so my external hard drive took a dive while it was running, 2 foot drop. its a 400gig u ata drive and had movies, music, a little porn, but the most important thing it had was pictures that i backed up on dvd a few months ago, but the ones since then havent been backed up. now when i turn it on windows wont recognize it, and it makes this kinda beeping sound every 5 seconds or so.

i did some research and seagate charges 50 bucks just to evaluate the thing, then more money if they can actually get the data back. who knows how much? there are other online services that do the same thing, but i guess id send it to seagate eventually cause im going to try and get it replaced under warranty as well.

i did find this thread that claims people have put their HD in the freezer after such accidents and they are able to get it working for long enough to extract some of the data. a few minutes would be all i needed for hte important stuff. anyone tried this? its seems like it worked for a lot of people, but im still nervous about damaging the drive further. basically they stick the enclosure in the freezer for several hours and then turn it on, while running the usb and power cables out to a laptop and keeping the hd in the freezer.

sounds crazy. any input on this or other methods would be appreciated. here is the thread i found:

http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/200...over-data.html
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post #2 of 6
1/26/07 at 3:35pm
that doesn't seem like a physically logical move to make, but if you believe it, at least put the whole thing in a tightly secured ziplock bag so you won't have moisture condensing all over everything.
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post #3 of 6
1/26/07 at 3:49pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by themessenger500
that doesn't seem like a physically logical move to make, but if you believe it, at least put the whole thing in a tightly secured ziplock bag so you won't have moisture condensing all over everything.


good idea with the ziplock. im not too excited about the whole thing either, but as of now i've got nothing to loose. im just exploring other options in case anyone here has thoughts.
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post #4 of 6
1/26/07 at 11:30pm
Perhaps only the enclosure or a connection is bad and the drive itself is okay. Try putting it into a different enclosure or a desktop PC.
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post #5 of 6
1/27/07 at 1:27am
Before you went all frozen on it... I would try to slave it. It's possible that a connection became loose within the enclosure. Can you hear the drive spin up normally?
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post #6 of 6
1/27/07 at 1:00pm
Freezing probably won't help you. The freezing trick is for when the bearing caps come lose and spray lubricant all over the the platters. You would then freeze it and turn it upside down, and the lubricant would fall onto the housing. This would give you *some* time to recover files before it sprayed again. We had two thousand some odd defective western digital caviars that all had this failure, during the RMA process with HP we would do this and we netted about 20% data recovery.
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