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Hi fellow mites! Something terrible just happened - my external hard drive with ALL my photos on it just gave in! It makes a funny noise - sounds like it is "getting stuck" all the time, and won't open up anymore. Took it to a PC-place close to us - they say it also doesn't open up on their PC's so they can't do anything.

Please - someone, tell me there is a way to get back my data lost...

Bushbuddies that is just awful!!! I've got no helpful advice....just hope you get your precious pics back!!! I've just put all my pics on an external hard drive, thinking that was the safest!!!

Does the external hard drive make like a tapping noise? If this is the case the best option would try and take it to a computer shop and ask them if they can try recover the data. (phone them and ask if they do it) Besides that not much hope

Hope you get sorted out! let us know what you do and if it worked.

Bushbuddies
If a computer company can't help there are companies that rebuild harddrives.
They will be somewhere on the internet.
Try Googling - Harddrive Data recovery.
There are several companies in the UK that do it. It stands to reason that there will be similar companies in SA
Good luck
Regards
JDW

You can ask Duques too, he is scary!

Hi Bushbuddies;

Certainly not time to give up any hope yet! You need a specialist. As JDW says - a bit of Googling and you will find a local solution. You may lose a few files; but most should be recoverable...

For the future; I always use TWO mirrored external HDs for back-up; so if one fails (as they do!) you always have the second. When the first fails, simply replace it, and re-mirror from the second... HDs are so cheap now; it makes sense to do that...

Hindsight is such a wonderful benefit!

Good luck...

As a PS; you should be prepared for the recovery exercise to be quite expensive

Yep, but at the moment he has only one bit of advice...
Usually it is not the actual harddisk that craches, but the logicboard on top. So if you can find a (secondhand) identical harddisk you can switch the board and try again.
If that doesn't help the Rands will hit the gutter, then you indeed need to go to a specialised company, and use their costly but effective services.

As EOS_User says, a mirrored drive will make your photos a lot safer, so for the other people that read here, buy something like this:


This is the one I have at home, and costs (in Holland) 127.50 euro, so around R1300. That is without disks. You can buy disks for next to nothing, I have 2x 1.5 TB disks in the little box. That is in RAID, so I have 1.5 TB available, not 3! But if one disk dies I simply swap it for a new one, and the array will rebuild the second disk.
It can do a lot more, like acting as a webserver, stream movies/music, download torrents etc, have a look here.
It's as quiet as a mouse, the only gripe I have with it is the rather bright LED in the on/off button. So I put duct tape over that.

Hi Bush

With out knowing what the sound is I cant really be to definitive in the solution I am going to try give you. There are 2 scenarios one a lot better than the other.

The better scenario
If the noise isnt a ticking noise it could just be that the cradle/casing that holds the drive is faulty, hence the drive not picking up. You could ask your local pc place if the can try put the drive in a new casing, casings are not very expensive, and all your data would be available if that is just the case.

The Worse Scenario
If they noise is a ticking noise, it indicates that a piece of hardware on the drive is broken. The only way to repair that is to take it to a specialized data recovery company, they will replace that part and clone your data onto a new drive, all your data should be present but thats not garunteed. The big downside to this is that its very expensive ranging from R4000 upwards

You can also try the old IT remedy that has worked for me, put your drive in the deep freeze for about 30minutes and give it a try.


PM for details of the company we use for data recovery.

Only problem is the poor standard of PC shops in South Africa, 90% of them wouldnt have any idea what you mean by RAID

Thank you all for the replies and sympathy!

Firstly, Spargish, unfortunately for me - the sound is a ticking sound. I'll do my best in saying: "TRRRRRRRRR TICK, TRRRRRRR TICK, TRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR..." (Hope that brought some entertainment... ) - so definitely a ticking sound... And the PC place I took it to did remove the outer casing and put it in another reader of sorts - which did not change the sound or the ability to read the HD at all.

So my hard drive is in the deep freeze as we speak (If that trick works - I'd owe you BIG time, Spargish!)... let's see if that helps. Guess if that doesn't work, I'll go get a quote on retrieving the data - but how much does one worth pictures...?

Just one more question. The photo's that I now can get a hold of are those I used for TR's. I obviously made them smaller with the "Paint"-program. Is there any way to get them back to their original size without just magnifying them and hence losing the quality?

BELIEVE YOU ME - I already bought a new ext HD, and will definitely buy another to "mirror" it. Learnt the very hard way!

Editing a JPG always means you lose pixels. JPEG is a lossy compression.
I recently edited a 6 MB JPG, and saved it with fairly high settings, 90% I believe. The resulting file was only 2 MB. So 4 MB of information was tossed out, never to come back.

The photos from your TR will be mementoes, but can not replace the originals.

Very sorry to hear bushbuddies A worst nightmare come true! Unfortunately i dont have any ideas but hope you get it sorted

DQ, I need to get me one of those

Really

The potential of water droplets (formed when you remove the unit back into warmer air) & electricity don't bode well to me! I really wouldn't do that if I were BB! Much rather wait & ensure I preserved as much data as possible; without trying to blow the thing up

Rule #1 on data-recovery is STOP whatever you're doing & DON'T do anything that may potentially worsen the situation...

Cheers...

See above



That's a question only you can answer! First thing is to find a reputable specialist; send the disc & get a quote; then you'll have an idea of what you're looking at... If the images are 'special' to you then they're worth a lot - to you!

Again; good luck...