I have an external Seagate 2tb hard drive that just died. It starts up makes 2 clicks and powers itself off. I downloaded and ran sea tools and it passes the SMART test (whatever that is) but windows does not recognize the drive. Unfortunately I have all of my family photos on this drive and I don't have money to get it looked at from professionals. Is there any tricks I can do to try and recover the data? Thanks
Seagate external harddrive problem.
- Thread starter Kmetz7547
- Start date
Solution
alceryes
Splendid
- Jun 11, 2004
- 4,353
- 930
- 27,090
Try the freezer trick.
Rubber band a couple paper towels around it, put it in a ziploc bag, and put it in the freezer for 8 hours. After 8 hours take it out (keeping it wrapped in the paper towels as water will start to condense) and quickly hook it up to a computer and immediately start copying the data off if it's accessible. If the failure is due to capacitor failure the cold temps might give you 5 mins of working operation before it fails again.
I have successfully retrieved data from 5-6 hard drives over the years using this method.
NOTE: If there is even the slightest chance that you will send this hard drive out to get the data professionally recovered I don't recommend trying anything at all. Every time you power it on you could be lowering your chance of a successful data recovery.
Rubber band a couple paper towels around it, put it in a ziploc bag, and put it in the freezer for 8 hours. After 8 hours take it out (keeping it wrapped in the paper towels as water will start to condense) and quickly hook it up to a computer and immediately start copying the data off if it's accessible. If the failure is due to capacitor failure the cold temps might give you 5 mins of working operation before it fails again.
I have successfully retrieved data from 5-6 hard drives over the years using this method.
NOTE: If there is even the slightest chance that you will send this hard drive out to get the data professionally recovered I don't recommend trying anything at all. Every time you power it on you could be lowering your chance of a successful data recovery.
seagate_surfer
Admirable
- Mar 31, 2017
- 1,788
- 20
- 6,565
Hi Kmetz,
we are very sorry to hear you are having issues with your drive!
However, since the SMART-test in SeaTools runs through successfully, there might be a chance the drive is not entirely dead and your data can be recovered. The SMART-test analyzes hard drive health, so the issue that the HDD is not being detected by Windows any more might be connected to some other problems with your system.
If you have a chance, please try to access the hard drive in another system that might be accessible to you and check if your data can be retrieved on that secondary system.
No need to mention we highly encourage you to NOT put any hard drives in the freezer or open them up since you will immediately lose your potentially remaining warranty!
We hope you will be successful in accessing the drive and in recovering your data!
we are very sorry to hear you are having issues with your drive!
However, since the SMART-test in SeaTools runs through successfully, there might be a chance the drive is not entirely dead and your data can be recovered. The SMART-test analyzes hard drive health, so the issue that the HDD is not being detected by Windows any more might be connected to some other problems with your system.
If you have a chance, please try to access the hard drive in another system that might be accessible to you and check if your data can be retrieved on that secondary system.
No need to mention we highly encourage you to NOT put any hard drives in the freezer or open them up since you will immediately lose your potentially remaining warranty!
We hope you will be successful in accessing the drive and in recovering your data!
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