HD failure Help

Ok, an almost new Seagate Free Agent Pro SATA/USB 500gb hard drive stopped reading or showing in win xp explorer. The external light around it lights so I know it's getting power. Also a quiet buzz instead of normal spin sound.

So anyone have an idea on how to retrieve about 1,000 processed videos from it without paying big money at a retrieve company?

Just love the world of hard drives.

Don

Search google... you'll find a few 'tricks'. I had the same thing happen. Luckily I turned it upside down and it started working, enough to rip the stuff to another hard drive. There are other tricks out there that say to freeze it (in a few zip lock bags to not get moisture in while freezing, then it will run enough to rip the stuff off, but will soon crash after. Good luck! You still have it all on minidv, right? Are those clips on P5, or were they 'to be uploaded'. Sorry about your luck Don. I know what I'll get you for christmas.

That's rough man, I lost a large amount of work 8 months ago. It still brings a tear to my eye.

On a few hard drives I had, the problem was that they wouldn't spin up. For an electric engine, the starting moment is usually the critical one. So what I did was that i rotated the drive so that the disks would get some rotation relative to the case and then the engine could take it from there. Note: No tilting, just rotating it as if it would be lying on a table and you were spinning it around. Try first one direction and then the other.

It’s getting power but maybe not enough. Additional things that you can do:

USB power or external power?

USB power – try another port or on another computer. Also try another cable.
external power – try another power supply.

Rudi

Don,
It may be the power supply. I use a number of external drives at work and the power supplies seem to be the failure in almost every case.

That said, I did use a recovery service that is in Dallas once. The diagonostic is free, if they can retrive any data that will cost anyware from $300- $2000. I know that is a lot but.......
I don't have the name in front of me but I have it at work, if you are interested in that I'll let you know monday.

Also, and this may be a stretch but I have heard that if you put the drive in the freezer for a little while, it may come back to life for enough time to get the data off of it.
That may be a load of crap, but what the hell.

I wanted to add something to this.
Since in my "real" job I'm a network administrator. Backup's are really important to my job.
I always make redundant backups to separate external drives, and one of them is stored offsite.
I figure you can have the best backups in the world but if your house gets broken into or burns down, you have nothing if all of your backups are in the same place.
I do the same for my stock photography work too.
Jake

Yes, backups are the best way to prevent this. I backup at home daily and at work to an external drive. (Hindsight is 20/20).

If you can get the drive to spin up once, run SpinRite on it at www.GRC.com. I've heard that can revive a "dead" hard drive long enough to retrieve files. But I also hear the process can take hours, days, or even weeks to complete.

I just had a new 1TB drive at work die, but I noticed it starting to fail and quickly grabbed my important files off it (some I missed, but that's par-for-the-course).

I think Google did a study on failure rates of hard drives, and it concluded with most drives that will fail, fail in the first 6 months or so. So a new drive should definitely be monitored and backed-up often.

Modern drives usually implement the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis,_and_Reporting_Technology protocol which it a way for the drive to talk about it's condition. On windows there are several good SMART monitor programs, but I tend to default install http://www.panterasoft.com/ which quite often manages to give you a fair warning when the drive is unhappy. You can also see present condition (including drive temperature (heat kills)).

Naturally they haven't implemented warnings for "approaching lightning strike" or "you're about to drop the drive in the ground please backup now", but it's like computer security in general - all you can do really is to better your odds using all means that you can.

Marcus

Large SSD flash drives like this: http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/19/buffalo-unveils-a-100gb-flash-drive/ don't really fail much. SSDs dont have moving parts, time before failure is guaranteed at one million hours. I don't backup, I should but whenever Ive had a hard drive failure on a computer Ive been able to get it back. Turn off your Hard drive when your not using it, plug it into a surge protector, and carry it like it was a newborn.