External Hard Drive

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.

I know it’s no consolation to you, but they should put this on a sticker with every hard drive sold.

Failure of disks is inevitable...storage is dirt cheap, and fit and forget back up software free.

Please folks...back up your stuff!

There are data recovery companies but the process is very costly ,chances are the data platters will have deep scratches in them now, the clicking sound is the heads hitting them. Bin it and use dvd to back up data its dirt cheap and despite rumours they don't last I still have disks I burnt in windows 95 days that are still ok.

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...

Tried wrapping the hard drive in clingfilm and putting it in the freezer.......didnt work.

Re: swapping the controller boards......have you ever tried to get the screws out that hold it to the hard drive........impossible without the proper tool, any idea of the size of the star bit

I would need to loosen the screws off and get them out - don't want to take a guess, and buy the wrong thing and waste my money.

I would imagine the screw are just Torx screws, nip in to Maplins and get a precision screwdriver set, should get one for under a tenner.