Hard drive gone bad

edited December 2006 in Hardware
I've got a hard drive that I've been using for years, and it hasn't given me any trouble until just recently. It worked fine before the holiday weekend, it worked fine during the weekend when I flew home to visit my family, but when I got back, it just quit working. It's a 7200 RPM, 300GB Seagate hard drive that I use in an external USB case to connect it to my laptop.

When I power it up, I can hear the disc spinning, but the computer doesn't recognize it. I can put another drive in the case and my computer will recognize it, so it's not the case that's giving me problems. When I power it down, I can hear a faint scraping sound when the platters are almost done spinning, kind of like there's something coming into contact with them.

Is there anything that I can do to recover the information on the disc, or will I have to send it in to have professional data recovery done on it? I've saved pretty much everything on this drive - music, videos, images, personal graphic and music projects - and a good deal of it would be difficult or impossible to replace. Any advice on the matter would be appreciated. Thanks.

Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited December 2006
    Given the scraping issue you reported, I advise you to leave your hard drive powered down until further notice. Unfortunately, though, the nature of the issue also tells me that this is a mechanical, not electronic problem.

    The only advanced solution I can conceive of at this time is to purchase another hard drive of the <i>exact same</i> make and model off of ebay. Swap the electronics on your harddrive with the ones from ebay; it's just a couple screws and a single plug to do it. If that doesn't work, you're going to have to look into professional services like Ontrack data recovery.
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