Recovering Data From a possibly failing External Harddrive

[eightysicksd]

I have a western digital 1tb external harddrive that has recently stopped being read by the computer, I believe due to the power going out one night.

It makes a sort of clicking noise like its trying to boot but keeps hanging up and is no longer read by the computer when I plug it in, as well as not showing up in the device manager.

I took it out of the enclosure to try to see if i could just plug it directly into the computer and It shows up in the BIOS, which i think gives me some hope, but can anyone me give me anymore suggestions before I take it to a local computer shop?

 

[hang-the-9]

What you have is very expensive to fix unless you get lucky. There are really a couple of things you can do to try to fix this without having someone open the hard-drive in a clean room and try to fix it that way.

Before doing anything physical to the drive, you can order an exact match for your system board for the drive, ebay should have something. Swap out the board and see what happens.

If that fails or you just want to bypass that try, freeze the drive for 5-6 hours, this can shift the mechanism enough to get the drive working. Another is a slight drop level onto a desk, that can also jar things a bit. Both of these have a slight chance of working, but better than spending a few hundred to a few thousand dollars on data recovery.