Broken External Hard Drive

Phil,

Is it getting enough power or are you using an external adapter? Some USB ports don't provide enough juice to fully power them up. Especially laptops that aren't plugged in. Some come with an extra usb dongle to assist. Vista will still recognize the interface in this situation but the platter can't spin up.

Alternatively, the drive had a failure either mechanically or in the boot or file table. I believe it is a 3.5" SATA drive so you could also pop the case and connect the drive to a direct SATA and power cable in a PC. If that doesn't work and you really need to retrieve the data, find a specialist who uses dust proof positive pressure labs to switch out the platters and save the data. This runs from $200-$700 depending on location and work involved.

I usually give mine a good whack or two and when it works I dump the data as fast as possible. Although, now I have everything backed up to a File server. (Too many f'ups from messing around)

Good Luck, let me know how it goes, I'm interested, especially if it something not in my essay above.

so if something breaks she gets mad at you? tell her to be mad at herself for not having made backups

try to put it internally and see if it runs, else you will need to pay a company to do it the hard way and it is really expensive