external HDD crashed

[paramesh]

Hi All,
can I post regarding external HDD issues here ?my Seagate external HDD(500GB) is not detecting,it has drop down from my hand . it has under warranty ,but I want to recovery my data,if any one know who can do data recovery in bangalore let me know,if data recovery will do by not seagate peoples,will it come under warranty or not?


thanks

 

[Saket]

Is it spinning? If not, not much we can do from outside, but if only the filesystem has gone bad, you can recover the files by softwares like 'recover my files'.
Last month I was through it so can feel the pain. Took me 5 days to back up whole data. Meanwhile I lost 10% of my data I guess.

YOu may like to post it in a proper sub-form here. This is an introduction thread. Will fetch you better replies.

Regards,
Saket

 

[Input2]

Open the case of the external harddrive and see that the IDE or SATA plug inside did not come loose when it was dropped.
Hard drives are heavy and can jar loose from the connectors when dropped, but I would not worry about the HD being damaged, they can stand a quite a bit of abuse.
Hook up the drive as you would normally and turn it on, with the side cover off the enclosure, do a wiggle test on the conections inside the enclosure.
If the external drive in it's case still does not work, probally the small converter pc board inside the HD enclosure is damaged. Take the drive out and pull the jumper on the drive to make it a slave drive, then connect it up to your computor ribbon cable or SATA cable. Then turn on your computor and you should see a extra drive when clicking on the computor icon.
Note that some HD the jumper needs to be moved to slave position, newer HD's the jumper needs to be removed from the drive.
After all that, you can drag all the information to the master drive or just leave it there and get a new HD external case.

 

[kholi_pankaj]

Hmm, I am wondering - I have a 4/5 year old external HDD (Moser Baer). Now, it takes a lifetime to boot up, and one of its partition is inaccessible (semaphore time out). Any suggestions or solutions?

 

[Input2]

Greetings

Connecting a external HD to the computer USB can take a long time to show, especially on older computers with USB version 1.1and USB version 2.2 . Once the hard drive is plugged into the USB it takes the computer time to know that it is there. The other problem I have run into is that the USB cable is not contacting and making a connection good enough for the computer to recognize that a external HD has between connected, wiggle the connector to get any response.

Not recognizing the other partition and are two reasons why this is happening.

First being that older operating systems like Windows 95,98 and even XP when formatting with those operating systems , the windows can not see any more then 130 MB, because at that time there were not any hard drives that went above 20MB. So when you format your computer with a 300MB hard drive, all what the older operating systems will see is 130MB .
The later versions of XP will be different.
The reason why the partition is not working is that it has not been formatted into a none logical drive with the NTFS type of file for XP. Windows 95 and 98 uses a FAT 32 file system to work on.

The only way that you can take an advantage of both the working partitions and get the none working partition to be used is to completely reformat the whole drive, deleting all the partitions.
Then if you use Windows to format, you may need to create two none Logical partitions of approx 130MB each, and when that is successful, you will see three drives when clicking on the computer icon.
When a partition is not accessible it has to be formatted into a none logical drive,and using windows XP to format this external drive as it will not see the complete drive over 130MB, it is difficult to do with Windows.
Using other software like Acronis Migrateasy version 7.0.0, makes this job much easier and very fast as the you can format the complete external drive as a none logical drive into the NTFS file system , that way windows will see the complete drive of 300MB , but only as a data drive, which you want anyways.

Semaphore time out is when the computer stopped looking for this drive, as if is not partitioned or is faulty, or having bad sectors on this drive that the computer can't read.
I have used Acronis to tell me what the problem will be with a defective drive , some times other software is needed to format and detect hard drive problems.

Hope this helps