How do I recover a hard drive that went bad

[amatoj]

I have a few WD externals that have gone bad. I plug them in, but they do not appear in my computer, but I still get the "new hardware" message, and it recognizes the hard drive as it will display the name of the hard drive. Is there a way to access it and recover whats on them?

 

[Guest]

I would dismantle the external casing and extract the drive -- there are various adapters available -- IDE/SATA etc to USB -- which may allow you to connect to the drive and ascertain whether the problem was with the drive or the electronics in the external box.

 

[amatoj]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I do have tried putting them in a SATA enclosure, still no luck with that. The hard drives still appear in device manager too.

 

[Guest]

If you have a desktop computer with SATA connector I would suggest mounting the drive in place of the existing one and try formatting it using the Windows CD. You may also be able to mount it as a secondary drive with the existing dirve and try using Windows to format the WD drive -- or via the Command Prompt's Format command.

 

[retardedspleen]

right click on my computer select manage. go to disk management. if the drive shows up there, theres still possibility to recover data from the drive.

If the drive does not show up in disk management, you will need professional data recovery most likely.

If the drive IS in disk management, there is a possibility that you can access the data from a linux CD. you can use a Ubuntu Live cd to check this.

An external enclosure is just a IDE/SATA to USB. your computer will register them as a hard drive. theres no need to remove the drives from there enclosure. especially since in most cases, people damage the enclosure trying to open them.

 

[Guest]

"theres no need to remove the drives from there enclosure. especially since in most cases, people damage the enclosure trying to open them."

This is sound advice -- though the reason for removing the drive is to isolate whether the problem is with the enclosure electronics or with the drive.

 

[retardedspleen]

"theres no need to remove the drives from there enclosure. especially since in most cases, people damage the enclosure trying to open them."

This is sound advice -- though the reason for removing the drive is to isolate whether the problem is with the enclosure electronics or with the drive.

I plug them in, but they do not appear in my computer, but I still get the "new hardware" message, and it recognizes the hard drive as it will display the name of the hard drive.

if it recognizes that there is a drive (by HD name) check disk management. make sure it still registers there. if yes, switch to linux. if no, the drive is bad, and you probably wont be able to extract data from the drive. although linux will still sometimes work.

 

[guavasauce]

yes, linux is awsome for data recovery.