Support NeoGAF

[ckohler]

An external USB 2 drive started giving me the click of death yesterday. I extracted it from its enclosure and discovered it's a SATA drive. So I plugged it in to a spare PC but the bios doesn't recognize it. It sees there is hardware but can't recognize it. Hundreds of gigabytes of data are now unavailable.

Thankfully my iPhone still has all my music on it and I can re-digitize my DVDs if I have to but there are files on that drive that if not recovered, are lost forever.

I heard that sometimes you can freeze a hard drive over night and it will work temporarily. Anyone tried that? Any other suggestions before I give up and pitch this bitch?

 

[Xeke]

An external USB 2 drive started giving me the click of death yesterday. I extracted it from its enclosure and discovered it's a SATA drive. So I plugged it in to a spare PC but the bios doesn't recognize it. It sees there is hardware but can't recognize it. Hundreds of gigabytes of data are now unavailable.

Thankfully my iPhone still has all my music on it and I can re-digitize my DVDs if I have to but there are files on that drive that if not recovered, are lost forever.

I heard that sometimes you can freeze a hard drive over night and it will work temporarily. Anyone tried that? Any other suggestions before I give up and pitch this bitch?

Yes. Wrap it in plastic wrap and put it in the freezer overnight. I lost an external to clicking and I was able to squeeze another 2 hours of life from it after freezing it for one night and was able to retrieve all my files. It works.

 

[BelligerentOC]

Yes. Wrap it in plastic wrap and put it in the freezer overnight. I lost an external to clicking and I was able to squeeze another 2 hours of life from it after freezing it for one night and was able to retrieve all my files. It works.

really and truly? ive never heard that.

 

[Phoenix]

Was it a WD external? I lost 2 of those before giving up on the brand altogether. Didn't even bother to turn the second one in for a warranty replacement. Picked up the Seagate external and while its larger and a little more unwieldy - it hasn't missed a beat, even after being bounced around for the past few months as I travel back and forth across the country. The WD survived for 2 months on the first, and 3 weeks on the second.

 

[chinmonster]

I've always worried about this happening to my external hdd, but it mostly serves as a backup, so it wouldn't be a big deal if it stopped working unless my actual computer's hdd stopped working at the same time.

 

[Illuminati]

Did you at least backup your pr0n or is all lost?

 

[Ephemeris]

Hmm, seems like a good time to ask this question: How much would data recovery on a 320GB drive cost?

 

[tagrat]

The freezer trick can work. Throw it in a ziploc bag and make sure no moisture can get in. Put it in the freezer for a few hours at the most. If you can't get any data that way you are going to have to go to a professional data recovery service such as Cherry Systems or DriveSavers/. Good luck man. I always hate having to tell customers to go to these sort of places because they cost an assload of money.

 

[dabig2]

I'm a paranoid son of a bitch, so I have a backup HDD of a backup HDD :lol


A 250 GB Beyond Micro HDD, which I primarily use every other day to back up shit on my laptop. And then a Maxtor 320 GB that backups the Beyond Micro HDD and also my laptop. I rarely turn this one on, except for the occasional monthly backup of my backups.