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Salvaging failing external HDD.

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  • Hard Drives
  • External Hard Drive
Last response: in Storage
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September 24, 2014 9:59:01 PM

I'm working on a HDD that is starting to fail presumably. It is filled with precious photos and music that should be backed up before it completely fails (if it already hasn't)

What I do know is that it's a seagate drive of some sort, it has around 500gb storage connected through a USB port (mostly likely USB 2.0) and requires an additional cable for power. The person I'm helping says that she thinks that it's no longer supported, but I'm not sure where her information is from as she didn't know much about the drive in the first place.

Now, it is not showing up in my computer, device manager, or diskmgmt.msc. It has been determined that the USB cable is fine, and three were tested. The light showing that the HDD is powered is showing up, so that is assumed to work. It was also plugged into every available USB port on three different computers: 2 running windows 8, one running xp, and with a combination of USB 2.0 and 3.0 between them...and all of them work under normal circumstances.

Now I assume would point to a failed drive. However it's making noise as if operating and reading the disc, and actually showed up once while trying to diagnosis it. I unfortunately turned it off and called it a day to come back to actually back up the files to see that it's not working again....

The final plan is to take apart the HDD and use a drive reader, but I'm not ready to do that quite yet because I was wondering if there were any steps I missed.

More about : salvaging failing external hdd

September 24, 2014 11:46:24 PM

Hi there SPECTRAL PHOENIX,

You could also try another power cable, even though it seems to be powering up with the current one. Also is the drive recognized in the BIOS?

Cheers,
D_Know_WD
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September 25, 2014 2:25:40 PM

D_Know_WD said:
Hi there SPECTRAL PHOENIX,

You could also try another power cable, even though it seems to be powering up with the current one. Also is the drive recognized in the BIOS?

Cheers,
D_Know_WD


Yes, does the drive show up in the BIOS? If it does, you may be able to use Seagate Seatools to troubleshoot the drive.

Yogi

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September 25, 2014 2:37:59 PM

If it is actually failing, the more you mess with it, the smaller likelihood of getting anything off it.

Take the drive out of the enclosure, and use a dock, cable, or other enclosure to try it.
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September 26, 2014 1:51:07 PM

Read this thread:
http://www.alexsoft.org/viewtopic.php?t=557

It's possible that the drive is going offline when it bogs down duries retries and reallocations, in which case the solution may be to disable this behaviour.
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