Hard Disk Crash

[Themoniter61]

So here the problem, i have an internal hard drive in an external enclosure. I accidentally pulled the USB cable and tumbling down came the hard drive. When i plug it in Windows (Vista home premium) recognizes it as USB mass storage but it doesn't show up in "My Computer". Now when i plug it in i get a bunch of weird beeps (I don't want to have an argument about hard drives beeping its beeping!) the disk doesn't spin up and nothing else happens. I already looked at professional data retrieval, and although i'm upset about losing the data i don't have 1500$ to recover it. I tried freezing it but still nothing. I get a cable error when i run diagnostics and nothing else. My only remaining option is to open it up or RMA it. The drive is a Western Digital 400gb WD caviar SE16. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with something like this? Could i retrieve the data myself, or just give up and Send it in for a new one?

 

[ethel]

Have you tried connecting it directly (i.e. without the enclosure)?

 

[slycanman]

I would connect it to another computer to see if the disk has the same symptoms. If it is not spinning up then it is pretty much time to ship it away for the RMA.....

 

[bydesign]

That funny user negligence and it's RMA. He should eat it, it was HIS own careless actions that caused the drive to fail. Do the right thing.

I have no sympathy for him what so ever.

 

[warezme]

Well, I'm going to argue....HD's don't beep., so your enclosure may be damaged and its interface may be damaged causing the beeping..., not the HD.

I would pull the drive out of the enclosure and plug it in direct. My suspicion is your HD is fine but your enclosure is damaged.

 

[roadrunner197069]

RMA it? Are you nuts? You dropped it; and therefore it isn't covered by warranty. Buy a new one if you must but don't waste your time trying to make someone else pay for your mistake.

 

[torcida_kutina]

right click on my computer, manage, disk managment, and if you dont see your HDD there, it's damaged.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

I agree with warezme, eliminate the enclosure as the source of the problems before you do anything else.

Take the enclosure apart, pull the drive out, mount the drive in the computer as an internal drive and see what happens. Once you get some indications from that, then you'll be able to determine how to proceed.

 

[onestar]

Unless the drive was actually writing at tumble time, the disk is probably ok. It is true, that I have never heard a hard drive make any noise that vaguely sounds like a beep, so the external enclosure may have some error associated with it. This would be especially suspected if the drive does not spin up within the enclosure.

Another USB enclosure is not expensive so I would just get one and transfer the drive.

 

[marshahu]

I'm not too familiar with model numbers but if your WD drive is an ATA drive then maybe you need to play around with the jumpers on the back of the drive.

I found when using some hard disks in my enclosure I had to remove all the jumpers or set it as master with no slave (i.e. direct connection) - only then did my hard disk get recognised and allocated a drive letter in My Computer and also offer the autoplay feature. Of course this I found out on my own accord as the manual on my hard disk made no mention of this. Also this wont apply on SATA drives as there are no jumpers to set.

Also try connecting your drive directly to the computer without any enclosure to narrow down possible causes.

 

[onestar]

Unless he moved a jumper, they do not need to be played with.
My opinion is that the enclosure is at fault and it is the enclosure that is beeping, not the hard drive.

 

[ayushrai]

Same problem here. The drive does BEEP! The spinning speed is very low, a faint whirrr. However during the more or less periodic beeps it stops spinning altogether. The casing seems ok. My desktop ony supports IDE so I'll take it to some shop and then see what happens...

PS: Seems the beep is the noise the heads makes while 'scratching' the platter.

 

[blazing4champion]

Man.., I know how desperate u r to retrieve ur data. Even i have the same problem here. It possibly is the problem of ur HDD i dont think there's a much problem in ur Enclosure...Just start saving ur money for Recovery........All the best.!


but i would also say u to never give up and just keep it just as ur last resource..

 

[trumanhw]

Bullshit. Its 99% NOT the users "fault." First off, these stupid ext-USB hard drives are effing GARBAGE. And, it is standard fare that they start chirping when they begin failing. And boy do they fail. They are also USB-port-'partial', if you will; behaving sporaticly on one port, only to be [more] consistent on another. But, in my experiences, when they start becoming more particular in their port-preference, its indicative that they are on the decline.

Its particularly annoying that MS has removed from the right-click menu of drives to "Safely Remove" ... requiring that you now find it in the safely remove sys-tray item, which is probably hidden, then to, hopefully, identify the correct device to remove by name or drive letter, in which the latter changes.. Why it's omitted from the menu options when its actually QUITE required is stupid. I say this because although many people are correct in assuming this is acceptable use (and is not stated overtly by mfg to not do it) there is good evidence to suggest its absolutely damaging over time:

1. your write may be corrupted without warning (i.e., stated to be 100% complete within the GUI)
2. removing sans 'safely-remove' and inserting in a ubuntu system will result in the drive being unreadable, 100% of the time. You'll have to re-insert it in a win system and safely remove for it to again be readable by the NTFS viewer (I forget what its called).

More off topic still, switching back and forth with an external enclosure that has firewire and USB, (or possibly just doing the following with just firewire) has resulted in total loss of data (or MBR) on more than 2 occasions for me, resulting in LONG data recovery exercises, and substantial loss.

The bottom line is, the implied "acceptable use" by platter-drives with write cache seems a great degree less reliable than what an end user would expect.

Final note, sata may be hot swappable in nature, however, when I reinserted a dvd-rom back in to my system yesterday, which albeit, is not necessarily a good idea.. (I knew better when I was removing it, less 'wrong' than re-installing it) upon inserting the power cord, my system shut down. It was NOT in the middle of a task.. completely idle. Upon rebooting, my OS drive had failed, to which, I had to do a low-level format to regain usable status (good thing I have multiple systems at home, I feel bad for people who have to trouble shoot without a backup system or two for formatting, getting drivers, or burning my Win7 disc to bootable USB given that Win7 notoriously doesn't read DVD-roms properly during installation).. Once I was back up in running, to my further surprise, my RAID-5 array (ICH10R) had been degraded! And, autonomously was rebuilding - which I thought was nice... at first. After 90 minutes, it showed that it was in a degraded state with a FAILED drive! Meaning, not only did this haphazard act of putting my ROM drive in fail my OS-drive.. but also, literally killed a drive in my raid array! Failing a recovery, I will next do a low level format to it, and try again, which I'd expect to work.

While on my soapbox of shitting hardware.. lets talk about wireless-N. In having tested 3 wireless-N routers in the last 10 days with no other protocols on the network (B,G or A).. I have consistently gotten speed tests that show my old G router has better performance! Better range, better speed! Translation, N fails to deliver in the two arenas it touts as the reason to shell your cash out for. I have gotten slightly better performance of my G router adding hi-gain antenna.

Yup - all anecdotal.. but I HIGHLY doubt that my disappointment of these precise things are the exception.

 

[trumanhw]

Oh - go ahead and add SSD drives to another under-performing, over stated claim. For the price difference, they should be throughputting, REAL WORLD, on a half-full drive.. over 400MB per second. And consumers should NOT have to convert Mb from MB. There should be ONE EFFING STANDARD! For me its irrelevant.. even when people err in typing the case, I know what it is per-topic. Consumers however don't. And even MORE importantly, they will not get the difference between bus speed, 3GB/s, vs Internal transfer speed, write and read. Consumers are over-manipulated.

And manufacturers should be PENALIZED for RESTRICTING devices from working to their full capacity. I.e., most new trackpads are able to understand multitouch input, however, mfg have restricted companies like synaptics from including certain models, those sold prior to multi-touch being advertised, from using said ability. This hurts the demand for innovation by allowing manufacturers to prosper from controlling use instead of creating new technology/refining it. If they want to save the money by not creating different hardware, then they should not benefit from restricting its use.