Question What should I do with an external hard drive that was compromised due to plugging into a power cord with adjustable voltage and smoking a little bit?

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JonChicoSchneider

Oct 11, 2024
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My power cord for my external drive got chewed on. Found another power cord that has adjustable voltage. I plug it in to my drive and a little bit of smoke came out (voltage was set a little too high). I unplugged the drive right away. Then, I got the original cord to work, the green light came on meaning it has power. When I go to disk management it doesn't show drive letter, whether it's healthy or not, etc... but the drive shows up where it says Disk 1, Online, basic etc. It asks me to initialize the drive.

I've called around to 4 or 5 data recovery services. Minimum cost ranges from 200 to 300 to 500 dollars. Max cost would be 1,000 dollars or more...

I'm hoping there isn't any physical damage to the disk. I'm also hoping something like EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard could do the job. Although the advice I was given was to leave the drive unplugged and get it serviced.
 
What should you do?

Replace it, and recover the data from your backup.



Lacking an actual backup, which appears to be the case....what tools have you tried?
What specific external? Maybe its just the case internals that are fried.

But, removing the physical drive from the enclosure and connecting it internally may bring other issues.
 
I haven't tried anything to avoid more issues. And I'm hoping being that the power is on and semi-detectable in windows that it's safe to try something like easeUS to avoid the heavy price tag.
 
JonChicoSchneider said:
I haven't tried anything to avoid more issues. And I'm hoping being that the power is on and semi-detectable in windows that it's safe to try something like easeUS to avoid the heavy price tag.
Click to expand...
There's 2 layers of detection.

Detecting the enclosure.
Detecting and using the drive inside.

What do you mean by 'semi-detectable'? Is it seen in Disk Management, and/or Device Manager?
 
by semi-detectable, i mean it shows up in disk management but again, it is seen under the left part of the window but not with the "blue rectangles." and asks me to initialize the hard drive. i don't know about device manager because I've left the drive unplugged. ...do i run into any kind of risk by plugging the working cord in again? 😕...
 
Last edited:
JonChicoSchneider said:
by semi-detectable, i mean it shows up in disk management but again, it is seen under the left part of the window but not with the "blue rectangles." and asks me to initialize the hard drive. i don't know about device manager because I've left the drive unplugged. ...is it safe to plug it in again?
Click to expand...
If it is unplugged, how is it showing in Disk Management?


Whatever procedure YOU are going to do...you have to plug it in again.
 
Screenshot-2024-10-11-125708.png
 
this is/was my backup. all my life's work. i know i know, will be buying another 8tb drive for this reason. hopefully this will all work out somehow.
 
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