Help with Maxtor drive

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IceDragon

IceDragon

Me uses the hat....
Dec 9, 2003
10,233
0
Belgium
Hello,

I'm in trouble :(.

I think my USB drive just died. It's a maxtor 3200 usb.

When I connect the device, my PC goes "DU-DING" as usual, but doesn't detect anything. Tried on my other PC, same problem.

When listening to it, it makes a ticking noise, like a clock on LSD.

I did a google search and apparently it is called "the click of death". Doesn't sound so good, eh ;).

I don't really care for the drive, but I do want my data back.

Can any of you hardware pros help me?
 
If you're feeling a bit brave, and don't mind (probably) voiding your warrantee, you could take the drive out of the enclosure and hook it up to a IDE/SATA slot on your mobo, jus like a normal drive.. sometimes the power on the enclosures go wrong, so you might get lucky and be able to get your data.

If windows still doesn't detect your drive, try booting off a linux live CD, such as ubuntu, or knoppix, etc - sometimes they will mount, where windows won't.

If you've given up entirely you can try some of the old tricks, such as dropping the drive from a small distance onto something not too hard (mine died recently and I dropped my drive from about 5cm above my mousepad, which gave me enough life to copy my data off it) - also the old, put it in the freezer for a day (inside a poly bag of course), and then immediately boot it up when you take it out. However, all those tricks are unlikely to work ;)
 
I was always on the understanding that the initial spinning up is the most strain a platter has to go under, so it's understandable that the motor only has a finite life.

As a last resort you can try and remove the top plate of the disk and manually give the platter a nudge to get over the initial spin up, while it's all plugged in. I've only got this working with 2.5" laptop drives, and even then, it's only worked 2 in 5 times.

The old 'freezer' trick I haven't seen in many years, and even then it was only used to reset codes on car stereos.

/edit - Freezing is also a big risk.

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/security/investigator/archives/myths-on-data-recovery-6749

The nudge to spin-up should really be a last resort.

You can send the drive away to data recovery specialists, but the average cost of recovery is over 800€, so should only be used if you really value that data.
 
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The only one of those that I have ever got to work on a failed HD is the swapping of the PCB, If as Uzi says you plug the HD into your PC directly and it doesnt get detected by BIOS then Id give up or prepare yourself for some serious spending to retreive the data from a recovery specialist.

If the data is so important that you just have to pay to retrieve it then you need to ask yourself why didnt you have a backup ;)
 
Hmm,

Just formatted my HD on my pc to make a fresh install, and external was my temporary backup. Of course the bastard died!.

I'll see if I know anyone into data recovery in RL. If so, I'll buy him a drink; else, I'll try opening it up and nudging.

Thanks for the input.

Byez
 
Your best bet in that case is do a recovery yourself on the drive you just formatted, you wont get everything back but you should get a large chunk of the information. the more you use it the more youll lose though.

I normally use Runtimes getdataback or Ontracks disk recovery.
 
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