OK this may be a long shot, but Marsupialized brought an external hard drive to me that had been knocked around by his gigantic fucking monster of a cat. He said the computer can't recognize it anymore, and he wanted me to have a look at it.

I tried plugging it into my Windows PC and XP recognized it as a "USB device" but couldn't tell that it was a hard drive. I plugged it into my Linux machine, which didn't even acknowledge its existence at all. I'm assuming Linux should have seen it right away if the drive was able to read the FAT.

Anyway, by that point I didn't know for sure whether the problem lay with the drive itself or with the circuitry inside the USB hard drive enclosure, so I opened up the case, removed the SATA hard drive, plugged it into my Linux box (on the secondary IDE channel) and rebooted. My motherboard's BIOS threw an error, something about the IDE channel not being able to properly detect the drive, and as a result the machine could never get to the Linux boot procedure with that drive installed. I powered down the machine and uninstalled the drive.

So I downloaded a disk drive recovery tool for Windows called Stellar Phoenix (http://www.stellarinfo.com/). That also was of no use in identifying, let alone fixing, the problem.

Do any of you have any experience with hard drive recovery practices? Is there some standard procedure or great miracle software I ought to use? Or is it a lost cause, the only hope lying with the expenditure of hundreds of dollars to some data recovery outfit?

BTW before any of you jokers even get started in on the obvious, NO THERE ARE NO BACKUP COPIES OF THE INFORMATION ON THIS DRIVE, OK?

Nina wrote:

Marsupialized wrote:anyone who thinks they can fix my shit should give it a shot, as they could then take whatever music they wanted off it. I have everything ever made worth hearing.

Will it power up or no?

Inside the enclosure, it powers up, the head moves around a bit, then it powers down.

Installed in a machine, it powers up, then makes a little bit of repetitive noise but doesn't mount.

Colonel Panic wrote: NO THERE ARE NO BACKUP COPIES OF THE INFORMATION ON THIS DRIVE, OK?

Yeah, kind of assumed as much. Who the fuck backs up an external?

What's the brand of the drive?

You plugged an SATA drive into a PATA interface? did you use some kind of adapter? or did I misread something?


Noises from the hard drive...if I was mistaken above, don't keep trying to access the drive. sounds like there is a mechanical problem and you are likely damaging the cylinders!

Nina wrote:

Colonel Panic wrote: NO THERE ARE NO BACKUP COPIES OF THE INFORMATION ON THIS DRIVE, OK?

Yeah, kind of assumed as much.

Well you know that's usually the first wiseass reply you get in a situation like this.

It's a SimpleTech, one of these: http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/pr ... arina.html

Well damn, willya look at this?

http://www.fixya.com/support/p435187-si ... ternal_usb

madlee wrote:You plugged an SATA drive into a PATA interface? did you use some kind of adapter? or did I misread something?

madlee, I think you may have just solved a problem for me that has been driving me crazy! I will check it out a bit later and shower praise upon you if that's what I overlooked. Sometimes it's the simplest thing.

madlee wrote:Noises from the hard drive...if I was mistaken above, don't keep trying to access the drive. sounds like there is a mechanical problem and you are likely damaging the cylinders!

There is a huge difference if the noise is a grinding noise vs. spinning in terms of the cylinders, isn't there?

No. You cannot plug a SATA drive into a PATA interface. They're 2 different form factors.

The PATA interface is a ribbon cable with 2 wide, 40-pin plugs and a SATA connector is small and flat, about the size of a USB connector with printed metal contacts.

One of my girlfriends firewire drives does the same thing when I try to mount it on my PC. If it was formatted on a Mac It may not be able to be mounted on a PC. The adverse of that isn't true though. Every drive I have formatted as NTFS works on both machines.

Try it on a Mac and see if it still fails.

My next step is to try installing it into a Windows machine with a mobo that supports SATA drives.

My only Windows box at this time is an older laptop.