Question dead external hard drive - need help cheap or free

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lvnhwood

Jan 16, 2025
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I have a 15 year old seagate external drive, the one that powers up on a dock station

6xw1xj84
9tn158-578

It's completely dead. I had a guy connect some cables to try to get a read and nothing. I can not afford data recovery. There are some old student films on there that I desperately need to recover. Can anyone suggest a free way of salvaging it? I'm willing to roll the dice.
 
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Wow, 15 years out of an external drive is well beyond projected life span. Things like this are why we push so hard for data backups, but putting your nose in it isn't helpful at the point. (moving forward though...)

Almost embarrassed to say that I have had luck a time or two by putting a HDD in the freezer with a long enough cable to reach out to a laptop. Don't take it out, just leave it in there and see if you get a response. Keep in mind that after you remove it from the freezer to let it sit on a desk for a while to allow it to return to normal temps and for the condensation to evaporate.
 
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lvnhwood said:
I have a 15 year old seagate external drive, the one that powers up on a dock station

6xw1xj84
9tn158-578

It's completely dead. I had a guy connect some cables to try to get a read and nothing. I can not afford data recovery. There are some old student films on there that I desperately need to recover. Can anyone suggest a free way of salvaging it? I'm willing to roll the dice.
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First, invent a time machine....

What "cable" did your guy use? Be specific, please.
 
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fzabkar said:
Did your guy use the wrong AC adaptor? Can you hear even the slightest sound from the drive?

Remove the drive and connect it to a SATA port on your computer's motherboard. If it still doesn't spin up, remove the HDD PCB and upload a photo of the component side.
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honestly i think it is a power issue. It was having trouble powering on and i could wiggle the docking station and it would boot sometimes. I bought a new docking station and it didn't help so i think it's something with the power connectors on the drive. What would i replace on the hard drive itself to help with that?
 
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COLGeek said:
Have you ever just tried connecting the HDD directly to a PC via standard SATA data (to the motherboard) and SATA power (to the PSU) cables?
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yes sir a guy off of marketplace tried that and it didn't detect on the computer. I think it's the power source because the hard drive worked fine but the power connection was going bad for a while. I tried a new dock station but it didn't work so the bad connection must be on the hard drive
 
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