Dead Hard Drive - Western Digital...Help!!

When people say open the harddrive, they mean the external casing. Do not open the actual hdd where the platers are. If you do, your professional recovery costs will start at £1,000 with a 20% success rate.

Get a new power supply for starters. If that fails, out the case and plug directly into pc. This has been said before ... Because this is the right thing to do

My recovery cost was £1,600. But we don't talk about that.
 
Carbonite - on line backup, automatic.

http://www.carbonite.com/

If you get burgled, the house burns down, or Britain gets destroyed in a nuclear blast, your files will still be safe in some data store in the US. :thumbs:.

If you are interested PM me, I can send you a link and we both get free months.
 
john-oh said:
Carbonite - on line backup, automatic.

http://www.carbonite.com/

If you get burgled, the house burns down, or Britain gets destroyed in a nuclear blast, your files will still be safe in some data store in the US. :thumbs:.

If you are interested PM me, I can send you a link and we both get free months.
Click to expand...

not very useful if you have, or create on a regular basis, GB's of data however
 
I use a small program called handy backup It can do a full backup then you can schedule incremental backups for any new files/photo's you add and these can be updated daily/weekly to another drive or FTP or over a LAN or a manual update any time on the click of a button. Well worth a look and fairly cheap too :thumbs:

It's very user friendly too, you don't need to be a computer geek to use it :)
 
horrocks said:
My not one year old remote hard drive seems to have dropped dead. I have no backup (this was it) and it has all my photos, documents and business stuff on it - in fact, I cleared down my entire PC hard drive onto this thing about 6 months ago, with documents and photos going back to 2003! Is there any chance that I will ever be able to retrieve it?

It is a Western Digital, huge. I think it was 700GB, if that is possible.
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I had something similar happen recently with an external Buffalo Drive (which contained a Wester Digital HD). As someone else has hinted, often the problem in this scenario is an outright failure or even a brown-out of the SATA to USB interface card in the enclosure.

My drive was used for none-critical data but it would have still have been a major inconvenience, (although not a disaster), if I couldn't recover it all.

After a bit of google'ing this is what I did to recover the situation...

Firstly, as suggested, I extracted the Hard Drive from the enclosure and installed it directly into one of my PC's in the hope that it would be readable. No such luck, Windows saw the drive but reported that it needed to be initialised/formatted before use.

Not deterred, I bough a copy of Recover My Files by GetData and set it away on the suspect drive. After a long time it found a copy of the NTFS Master File Table and I was able to save off all of the files to another HD.

After that, I re-formatted the suspect drive, ran a lot of diagnostics on it which all suggested that it was fine, and concluded that the it was the SATA/USB card to blame.

This may not help in your situation but it may still be worth a try or help others.
 
not very useful if you have, or create on a regular basis, GB's of data however
Click to expand...
I currently have 145 GB of data backed up on Carbonite.

Takes a little while initially (a few days) then it just trickles away.
 
neil_g said:
not sure i agree, its still eggs in 1 basket principle.
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Sorry dude, cant see that having no disc redundancy is better than having some disc redundancy. As I said, I also back it up to a server with RAID on that, I would have be unlucky for all 21 drives and the RAID controlers to go down at the same time.

The only thing I might add is a tape drive to my server and storing the tapes off site.
 
Spike j said:
Sorry dude, cant see that having no disc redundancy is better than having some disc redundancy. As I said, I also back it up to a server with RAID on that, I would have be unlucky for all 21 drives and the RAID controlers to go down at the same time.

The only thing I might add is a tape drive to my server and storing the tapes off site.
Click to expand...

sorry still disagree. ive had servers SCSI RAID controllers fail and nuke all attached drives on a couple of occasions. thats why all servers get backed up to tape (or separate off site storage)so a separate device/medium altogether.

if anyone is using RAID as a single point of storage then they need to factor in another separate device for backing up.
 
The June edition of PCPro (DVD version) has a a disk with (amongst other things) a 6 months trial of Carbonite.
 
john-oh said:
Carbonite - on line backup, automatic.

http://www.carbonite.com/

If you get burgled, the house burns down, or Britain gets destroyed in a nuclear blast, your files will still be safe in some data store in the US.
Click to expand...

And then you wait six years to download the 700GB of data you've got backed up. Most UK ISPs will allow something like 10GB per month of downloads.
 
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