External HDD Failure
 

Hello everyone,

Just recently my External HDD suddenly stopped operating. I came into the Computer room turned on everything and suddenly my External did not show up on my computer. At first I thought maybe it was the External case damaged so I installed the Hard Drive itself into my computer and the same thing happens.

I checked the hard drive under Disk Management, Computer Management, and also tried to add new hardware and it doesn't show nor nothing to add. I also sent it to Seagate (since Seagate bought Maxtor) and they wanted to do a recovery for me for $1600 and honestly I do not have that much money to spend but I have a lot of business reports and files in that external.

Is there anything I could do or even try to recover it myself...

Information:
Media : Maxtor One Touch IEEE 1394 SBPS
Serial#: Y45JL1PE

When you said this:

"I installed the Hard Drive itself into my computer and the same thing happens."

did you mean that you took it out of the enclosure, and plugged it straight into your computer like a normal internal hard drive?

If not, can you do this without voiding any warranties or destroying anything?
Also, does your computer at least identify that there is a device plugged into the 1394 port?

Yes that is exactly what I meant...sorry for the harsh grammar...its just an aggravating situation.

I believe it does void warranty but like I said I already previously I gave it a shot and its gonna cost me $1600 that I cannot spare like that...

The link here is a pic of my Device manager with hopefully everything that you would need to look at...

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e89/Kloak/Manager.jpg

Thanx for all the troubles and hopefully we can solve this or at least suck my information out

Well, it looks like your Maxtor OneTouch IS installed on your computer. Looking under the "disk drives" section. It may need to be activated, or some random crap like that. Just don't do anything until told to do so.
Is this a current screen shot?

Now, in the left column, click on "Disk Management" and look for a potential third hard drive. Let me know what you see.

Just don't change any settings until told to do so. One wrong step in Disk Managements can mean a HUGE pain in the butt.

yes its current...just took it when u asked me

Just finished checking and it takes forever for the disk management to load and I'm guessing its because of the hard drive...it never took this long to load Disk Management...but anyways now that it finished loading I see the following:

HP_Pavillion (C:) Parition Basic NTFS Healthy (System)
HP_Recovery Partition Basic FAT32 HEalthy (EISA Configuration)
New Volume (D:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy
DOOM3 (F:) Partitioin Baisc CDFS Healthy

So what do you see in Disk Management???

HP_Pavillion (C Parition Basic NTFS Healthy (System)
HP_Recovery Partition Basic FAT32 HEalthy (EISA Configuration)
New Volume (D Partition Basic NTFS Healthy
DOOM3 (F Partitioin Baisc CDFS Healthy

nothing else

Please excuse my impatience. =p
Is New Volume your second hard drive? (looks like you have two WD drives)
If so, and they aren't in a striped RAID configuration, turn off your computer, and plug in the drive as an internal drive. Turn it back on, and let me know if you have a little bit of progress.

You may have to do a quick format just to make the drive practically accessible, and then run a file recovery program.

This is probably the fifth Maxtor HD (external) that I've heard of failing in the last three months. I avoid Maxtor drives like the plague, since they've given me and my colleagues nothing but trouble.

Format would format everything right...then how would the files be recovered...I'm afraid if i format its the end of all my documents...

Well, if you use a quick format, all it will do is delete the file tables. It is important that you use quick format, instead of a full format. A full format will go over all the data on the drive, and overwrite it with (I'm assuming) 0s; which is of course not good.
The quick format will make the files conventionally inaccessible. However, there are programs that exist which scan every part of the drive and catalog every file that exists on the drive which hasn't been overwritten.
With such a program however, you will have to offload the rescued data from the drive onto another, usable drive.

Just to add to the list of failed Maxtor drives, I had the exact same problem just last weekend with an internal Maxtor drive which was put in a special enclosure.

I used Active@'s hard drive recovery program.

However, before formatting anything, lets just make sure that it is completely inaccessible from the IDE linkup.

ok so plug it in...do a quick format and use Active@ program?

Yeah, pretty much.
The program isn't all that user friendly though, so read the help files and guide pretty thoroughly. If you have questions about the program, go ahead and ask me.
And make sure you have enough hard drive space on another drive to offload the contents of your external drive.

I'm scared...lol...but why should it matter...if this doesn't work I lost all my data anyways right

There's always the possibility of shelling out $1600 for someone else to use a $30 program for 4 hours tops working on this, with the supposed guarantee that all of your data will be recovered. =P

Ook I finally did the procedure and everything turned out excellent...I was able to retrieve all of my important data and after that I reformatted the HDD and now able to use it as one...

Thanx so much

And thanks for the explaination Packrat. A friend recently asked me the differences between the two formats. I, under what I call an educated guess (and I THOUGHT I heard those were the differences) said what you said about quick/full formatting. Good to hear I was/am correct.

You could use something like GetDataBack on the drive without quickformatting. But whatever works.

And $1600 is a bullshit price, considering that the disk isn't even physically damaged.

Or use Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS. Great program.

I think I've posted it and a patch either here or in Other Requests...