External hard drive problem

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Happy new year everyone, Where to start,
Ive been sorting out my Sister broadband and computer thanks to forum members her broadband is running nicely. her computer was running slow after a quick look, pointed out to her that the hard drive was virtually full, recomended putting all her pictures on an external hard drive to free up space fine so far. She recieved as a christmas present a 500gb maxtor external hard drive great her husband pluged it in and started to copy the images over then deleted them from the original harddrive pc got quicker and the pictures open up on the external, all would seem fine that is until the husband got up to make a cup of tea caught the external harddrive lead with his feet and sent the hard drive flying across the room. Now the computer dosnt see the hard drive and makes a beep sound when plugged in.
question is? is she screwed or is there something I can do to save the pictures on this hard drive.

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

have you tried another lead?

 

In regards to to the external hard drive working as an external HD, i dont know it may just be damage to the connectors on the casing causing the problem. you could open up the external hard drive and remove the actual hard drive from its case, then attach the hard drive internally to the pc, this may let the pc see the HD and view the data.

 

No but ill give it a go.

 

I concidered this but when I took the hard drive out of the casing there are no jumper settings.

 

My guess would be 'no', sorry mof

Most external drives are extremely badly designed - they look nicer than they used to, but have absolutely nothing in the way of protection from shocks. I know this from personal (and recent) experience, after getting an external HDD for my mum, taking it round there and connecting it up only to knock it over on the desk (bearing in mind this is just knocking the drive over from a vertical to horizontal position, not onto the floor or dropping it). End result was a hosed drive and me sixty quid out of pocket.

If it was just the connector that had been damaged by being pulled out violently then I'd say you have a decent chance of getting it working again. If, as you say, the drive 'went flying' then there's more chance of Charlton winning the European cup this season.

 

Im thinking of plugging the hard drive into my PC at home (internally) is this A bad idear? ie not knowing the jumper settings.

 

There should be markings on the drive for the jumper settings, (assuming it isn't a SATA drive).

Harry.

 

I had a very similar "disaster" (well i had all the important stuff backed up).
The beeping I had referrered to a drive head failiure, and if you have seen them (well i opened mine up for a giggle) you see how brittle they look.

So unfortunately you may need to send it to a data recovery specialist, and they arent cheap.

 

It mabe A sata drive

 

Ah - I assumed that as you have had the drive out you knew which it was!

SATA drives don't need jumpers, as there is only one drive per cable. Having said that, I've seen lots of such drives with jumpers, but they are for limiting the size of the disk and other things.

Harry.

 

yes your quite right I have removed the hard drive from its casing and it is SATA, Can both types sit happily together in the same PC.

 

Assuming you have a SATA Connector on your motherboard or a SATA controller card and a suitable SATA power cable from the PSU you should have no problems at all.

 

You can buy a sata to IDE convertor

http://www.homestead.co.uk/productcategorydetail.aspx?categoryid=51066

 

All external hard-drives are formatted as Fat32 for compatibility reasons.

 

My experience with these units shows this to be true, but a distinction has to be made between an 'external drive' and a NAS, which is not always appreciated by the public.

Many NAS's that I have seen use ext2 or ext3 rather than FAT.

Harry.

 

well my pc couldnt see it, last option is to put the drive into a new external case after that the option is to through it into the re-cycling or non re-cycling bin.
in the mean time ill run a file restore programe on her pc to see if I can get her pictures back. Hope the year gets better from here fiddle.