External Hard Drive

I have two External Hard Drives - both powered by an identical PSU.

Recently one of the Hard Drives has ceased to work with its PSU and the led indicator

shows a constant green illumination, it wont work when I try to access the contents of the drive on my desktop computer.

I have changed the PSU from the one I suspected maybe faulty to the one that works the other external hard drive and when I do this instead of the hard drive showing a green led,

it shows a very fast red flickering led ( as though something is being written to its drive ).

Any know what could be the problem and how to fix it ?

Have you checked the voltages on the psu's.

Have you checked the voltages on the psu's.

Yes and both are 12 volt 1.5amp.

The faulty hard drive is showing a green led which leads you to believe that its working, occasionally, the green led will flicker between green and red, and I can hear the drive making a clicking sound.

Try to access the drive on my desktop, and it doesn't show up.

Up until 3 days ago, the drive was working perfectly.

Have you visited manufacturer website for fault diagnostics?

Have you tried putting the HD in a different case?

Yes and it made no difference......it showed the same symptoms......green led showing with an occasional red flicker led.

I can hear it clicking has though its trying to run but something is preventing it from doing so.

If it's almost a regular "tick, tick" then a pause, Then "tick, tick" again (or similar) then it's likely the disk has failed..

if you have tried it in a different enclosure, the only other thing to try is to plug directly into the PC via SATA (if possible) eliminating everything else...

if it still doesn't show, you could check windows Disk Manager, to see if it even shows in there (which it may, without a drive letter)

Then there are various other things you can do to see if it's actually detected at all (look in Device Manager, or your computers BIOS)

if all above fail, then i'm afraid it sounds like it's dead.

How did you get on with the drive John Habs, you sorted it out yet ?

How did you get on with the drive John Habs, you sorted it out yet ?

No its not sorted unfortunately and I'm a bit upset to say the least.....looks like I have lost

8 years worth of photo's of Places my wife and I have visited and other un-replaceable photo's of our pet who pass on in August 2013.

Have tried everything to try and get it going......but just won't have it, have been into the manufacturers website to try and get info,but looks like the model I have is an old one.

Also looks like what Ghozer says has happened......the drive is dead.

With the intermittent clicking, I thought the drive was trying to start up but sticking - before I dispose of it, I'm going to strip it down as far as I can and see if there's anything I can do to make the drive spin and start up.......failing that, I put the hammer through it.

Absolutely no guarantees but in a special magazine edition on hard drives there was mention of wrapping hard drive in loads of cling film and putting in freezer for a couple of hours then put drive back in. Have tried changing the plane the drive sits from horizontal to on it's long side? And I don't mean resting on short edge, you should never do that as heads can drop on to platters.

Absolutely no guarantees but in a special magazine edition on hard drives there was mention of wrapping hard drive in loads of cling film and putting in freezer for a couple of hours then put drive back in. Have tried changing the plane the drive sits from horizontal to on it's long side? And I don't mean resting on short edge, you should never do that as heads can drop on to platters.

Have done this before and it lived long enough to recover (most) of the data from it...

No idea how it works, but it did... (not 100% of the time though) - and seems to only work with IDE drives for some reason (every SATA I tried didn't work) - but may be worth trying as a last resort..

Also, don't strip it down, try and find another one the same make and model, with a date code as close to a match as you can (the closer the date code, the more chance of it working) - then switch out the controller boards...

Have done this before and it lived long enough to recover (most) of the data from it...

 

No idea how it works, but it did... (not 100% of the time though) - and seems to only work with IDE drives for some reason (every SATA I tried didn't work) - but may be worth trying as a last resort..

 

Also, don't strip it down, try and find another one the same make and model, with a date code as close to a match as you can (the closer the date code, the more chance of it working) - then switch out the controller boards...

Controller Boards: is that the part that houses the large multi pin socket and the 4 pin socket

along with the led indicator light, USB socket and the socket for the PSU ?

If Yes, then I have already tried that with the other external hard drive which is the same as the faulty one........still didn't work. Only thing I've not tried yet is the cling film / freezer thing.

Controller Boards: is that the part that houses the large multi pin socket and the 4 pin socket

along with the led indicator light, USB socket and the socket for the PSU ?

If Yes, then I have already tried that with the other external hard drive which is the same as the faulty one........still didn't work. Only thing I've not tried yet is the cling film / freezer thing.

No, the bit on the hard drive it's self...

If you are taking it out of an External enclosure, there will be 4 main parts... (excluding separate power supply)

1) Enclosure / housing

2) interface cirduit in enclosure / housing (usually with power/USB)

3) Hard Drive

4) Hard Drive controller (circuit attached to the bottom of the hard drive, usually has SATA connections)

it's #4 i'm referring to....