U/S ext hard drive

[ray liotta]

I have a Lacie external hard drive that no longer mounts onto my computer. Anyone advise of a good way to recover and transfer that data? Without taking it to an expensive recovery company that would want a $1000 or so.
It would appear that the drive is mechanically damaged as it emits a loud clunk instead of mounting on the desk top.

 

[Cobster]

If the files are REALLY that important, pony up the money and let the pros recover it in their controlled environments.
If not, tons of various free programs out there you can try. But if it's physical damage, no program can help, that's when you go to the pros.

 

[WoodPeckr]

...It would appear that the drive is mechanically damaged as it emits a loud clunk instead of mounting on the desk top.

Not a good sign.
If you only backed up your important files on one ex drive ya got a big problem. All important stuff should be saved on 2 or 3 different drives.

 

[ray liotta]

It was my media drive-about 300gb of music. If not recoverable it means importing each individual cd again.
I guess nowadays one should just duplicate everything on 2 ext hard drives.

 

[larry]

... nowadays ...

Huh? not just nowadays.

i would pull the drive out of the enclosure and connect it directly to the pc.

 

[The Options Menu]

At home I use a mirrored software RAID, with a USB HD backup. Once a year I grow my RAID, put one of the old disks in the enclosure, and move the second to a foam lined tin box at my parents' place. The old disk in that box gets cleaned and passed along. On the 'shared media' partition I can only read the files. I have to log in as a special user to modify / delete them. The last time I lost data was 98, including about 300 man hours of source code (of 1000+ hours of work) I wrote, and most of the rest of the stuff I accumulated. Up to a year's data it still vulnerably to mass freezing / fire / flood, but any one event would have to nuke 3 disks.