So – my external hard drive is broken – I know, should have had a second back up… but there you go (will do in the future).

Issue – sounds hard wear related – as a clunky noise straight away when connected for about 10 secs then nothing. Doesn’t show up in a macbook air (Mavericks), macbook (lion) or windows laptop (MS 7). Its USB 3 supported (Transcend 1tb jobby).

Options –

Work ICT – going to talk to works ICT (good friends) tomorrow but guessing they may not have anything useful to say.
PC World – has anyone experience with using their recovery service…?
Other recovery services – any experience – recommendations.

Willing to spend some money (up to £150) as have a lot of photos and some music video footage for my brother.

Any suggestions…?

Is this a 3.5″ or 2.5″ drive ie desktop or portable? If desktop check the power supply isn’t failing and not supplying enough power. If portable try using a powered USB hub or one of those cables that have 2 USB plugs to draw twice the power.

I’ve got a couple of portable drives which click when the USB isn’t supplying enough power. Oddly if I turn one of them on it’s side it will often work.

PC World – has anyone experience with using their recovery service…?

I don’t think Gary Glitter recommends it.

Mr_C – thanks for your response – its a 2.5″ portable.

It has a wire with two usb plugs and I tried that in my macbook and the windows laptop. The first thing I want to try is another wire (my brother potentially has one) but will have to see.

I have a powered USB hub but my potential worry is that actually caused the issue (Happened while plugged into it).

Its one of these btw.

Ooo, I’ve got one of those too, dead old, 350gb USB powered one.

Remind me to back it up tomorrow please.

Disben

Your drive is most likely a standard Sata drive with some electronics to “bridge” it to USB. Your best hope is that this bridge and/or the cable has failed. You can get something like his http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/components-upgrades/internal-hard-drives/enclosures/dynamode-2-5-sata-hard-drive-enclosure-black-21426663-pdt.html , take apart what you have already and put the drive in it, and hope it works. If you do get the drive to work, even intermittently, some people will suggest forensic-style imaging using something like dd, which copies the drive sector by sector. I would not do this I’m your case, as if the drive only has so much “life” left in it, you don’t want to waste that copying blank sectors only to have the drive fail terminally before you have copied the valuable data. Instead, if you do get the drive back up, just copy off the date in order of irreplacabilty.

Have to say, in my experience the clunky sound does not augur well but may not be terminal. Don’t know how good PC world would be, full-spec data recovery firms are likely to be too expensive. If I were you, I’d get your ICT friend to help, try the replacement enclosure above as a possible cheap fix, and maybe try the free tools at http://www.cgsecurity.org with their help, with the important rule that you should never try and recover data to the drive you are recovering, always to a separate drive. Whatever you do, if Windows suddenly can see the drive again and offers to format it, say no!

If you do decide to go the professional firm route, I have heard good reports about Disklabs (and no, I have nothing to do with them!).

Good luck!

Does it start to spin, make some noises then stop spinning? Or does it remain spinning after the 10 seconds.

If the 1st then that tends to suggest that the drive hardware is not passing its initial self test, detecting an error and shutting down…. It’ll not respond any further. Without a spinning drive you’ll get nowhere to be honest.

If it is spinning, then the suggestions so far are decent. There are some good program’s that are designed to give low level access to drives. I.e. they look for raw data primarily, and format structure second.

I had a hard drive that had trouble spinning up but was fine when it was spinning, so I didn’t switch it off. Then it was left off for a week and wouldn’t spin at all. I guessed it was because it was cold so warmed it to about 50º, it spun up fine.

Good data recovery is difficult and expensive. There are many amateur techniques, but all carry some risk and if you end up sending it to the pros anyway then you may make matters worse. So you need to decide first off whether you’re prepared to spend a wodge of cash or whether “we couldn’t recover it, sorry” is acceptable.

As apj says, it might just be the caddy. Pulling the drive out and hooking it up in a PC might give you positive results, if nothing else it’s one less variable to worry about. Recuva is supposed to be a decent recovery tool though I’ve not used it myself.

I believe PC World send the drives away for data recovery; where they send them too I’m not sure offhand, I’ll try and find out.

Ok, I spoke to my PC World mole. PCW send their drives to a company called Kroll, who have a lab in that London and one in Holland. You’re looking in the region of £700 via PCW, I expect it’s cheaper if you go direct.

Backups are cheaper and easier than data recovery.