EX HARD DRIVE

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Hi I was wondering if anybody could advise me please.
I want to know if you can take a hard drive out of a external hard drive casing and fit it straight into my tower?
i had a external hard drive that went wrong and i can not get to the files on the hard drive, i think the circuit board has gone and there are loads of family photos plus important stuff that i need to keep.

kind regards

Dave

 

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I dont think its possible to take the actual disk platters etc out of external hard drive casing.

I am sure someone on here might be able to advise you on data recovery but I cant

I hope it turns out ok for you

 

It rather depends on what has gone wrong. It is, of course, possible that it is the drive that has failed, rather than the external USB or Firewire box.

But, in general, yes you can take the drive out of the case and mount it in the main computer. There *are* a number of gotchas, but as long as the computer is fairly recent it should be OK.

Harry.

 

thank you for your help, its not the platters i want to take out but the whole drive out of the casing and fit it into my tower..by the way i was in keswick thursday and the weather was awful is it still raining up there?

regards Dave

 

thank you Harry, i think the circuit boad in the casing has gone thats why i want to try it this way plus i dont really want to start messing about with the platters unless its a last resort.
i have bought another external hard drive which is the same as the other one that is broke and i'm going to try and fit the hard drive into that one first before attempting to put it into my machine...once again thank you

 

If you think the actual control board on the hard disc has died then you could purchase another identical hard drive (make and model) and swap the controller discs around, this would enable you to boot up the hard disc and recover the data. ( i would advise re-swapping the controller cards though since the origional problem might be the hard disc and it could fry the card again.)

 

I assume he was talking about the circuit board that provides the IDE to USB interface in the external housing. If that is all that is gone, then there is a good chance you could connect the hard drive internally to a PC and get the data off it.

 

yep still raining

 

Agreed - I had a LaCie 160Gb external HDD and from the sounds of it the same thing happened to me. Formatting the drive generated errors and writing problems - took the casing apart (extra screws under the "warranty void if removed" stickers) and whilst it was tight you could basically unscrew the HDD from the mount and unplug the cables. Once inside my main system all the problems went away.

Most external HDD's are simply internal HDD's mounted onto a chasis with some extra circuit wizardry to enable a IDE-USB connection.

Edit: Just thought too. The interesting thing was that the LaCie drive was out of warranty, but the internal Samsung HDD was still in warranty (serial number via their website confirmed this). Perhaps if you have problems and it's out of warranty you chould check the drive just in case ?

 

If you take the hard drive out of the caddy and put it in your tower, there is a good chance this will work. The only thing you need to look out for is the master slave jumper. In the caddy, the hard drive is probably set to master. Depending on how you connect it to your PC you will need to make sure that it is set correctly. If it is going to share a cable with your existing HDD or DVD drive, you will probably need to set it to slave or you may have trouble booting the system or accessing your data.