Dead drive

[Gerry]

My 500gb Maxtor One-Touch external drive has just up and died on me. Started making clicking noises this morning, then started making a second very strange squeaking or rubbing noise and now it's just dead. (btw this is my office pc. Most of the files are work files and are backed up on the server).

 

It's about three or four years old and was way less than half full. I've unplugged and replugged several times but all it does is keep the computer from doing anything, like the computer can see it but can't read it, so the cpu hangs just trying and failing to read the disk.

 

I've been looking at data recovery sites online and it looks like it could be expensive and complicated. I backed up most of my personal work in the summer and haven't added much to them except for that Colfax modeling tutorial, and that hasn't gone too far. All my "Cicak" files are on another drive that I carry back and forth with me from home.

 

So, too bad! Not too much lost really, and unless someone here has a magic fix, all I'm asking for is sympathy!

[Wildsided]

Tough break Gerry,

 

The clicking/squeaking rubbing sound is the the magnetic reading arm that's supposed to float over the disk, failing and grinding against the disk instead. (I think I remember reading that somewhere or I could just be completely wrong).

 

You could try popping open the External drives casing and taking out the drive, then connect it to your PC directly, coz external drives are just internal HDD's inside an enclosure. Although how you would go about doing that is beyond me. I just remember my brother in law taking an internal hard drive and putting it in an enclosure. So doing it the other way must work too.

 

Anyway that's all I got other than sympathy. Bloody technology eh? screws you over just when you don't want it to.

[largento]

I've rescued some external drives by taking them and installing them internally or in an enclosure, but all had failed because of the mechanics of the enclosure, not the drive itself.

 

Clicking is disaster.

[robcat2075]

I'm surprised an external drive is hanging your computer. It's just a USB connection , right?

 

Glad you didn't lose too much!

[itsjustme]

I'm sorry to hear about the data loss, Gerry. I realize this is after-the-fact, but, you might consider a weekly or monthly backup to CD or DVD or use online storage as a double backup. I use Box.net...there are several others, it's just what I use.

[Gerry]

Well our office network is supposed to run regular backups, and the hard drives do get backed up, but what with getting our servers updated, and an IT guy who is often unreachable, and various ins and outs and what-have-you's, the external drives never got queued up to get backed up as well, even though that's where all my work is.

 

I've also put internal drives into enclosures and used them as archives for data I didn't want to copy over to a new hard drive, but I'm not sure it works in reverse, especially when the problem is the read/write head rubbing, which I'm pretty sure is what the last sound was before it just crapped out. I'm going to take it home tonight and hook it up to the Mac just to see what I can see. As I said, when I hook up the failed drive to my pc, the whole computer hangs until I turn it off. So it looks like the cpu can *see* the drive, and tries to read it, but can't. And Macs are magic machines, there I said it, so who knows...?

 

One of the very odd symptoms just before it failed, I was rendering some targa's out of AfterEffects to my portable drive, and when I was doing that is when the failing drive made the most noise, even though I wasn't using it at all.

[mouseman]

Possibility - buy TWO external drives. Use one for regular work, and have your own backup program that runs nightly and creates compressed backups of the regular work drive onto the 2nd external drive. Drives are relatively cheap; recovering months of work is not.

[Gerry]

I'm getting a new external drive with two separate disks for reduncancy, and we're looking into backing up the externals on the company server as well. but I have a feeling it will be a lot of headaches even if the files are recoverable. I've asked our IT guy to load any recovered files onto the new drive, and I'll just hook it up and start sorting through stuff.

 

I read an article online yesterday that said recovered files are often renamed generically and do not keep their original file names. If that's the case I will have a lot of sorting to do. In the case of AM files, even if everything's intact I suppose I'll have to manually reassign every dang decal and displacement map individually.

 

I hooked the drive up to the Mac last night and Disk Utility did see the drive, but it wouldn't mount.