talkmagic.co.uk

Some of you may know that my laptop kicked the bucket recently, in a deadly encounter with a mug of coffee. Anyway, I got myself a hard disk enclosure, plugged the HD in and then connected it to another laptop.

Nothing.

The laptop doesn't even acknowledge that the external HD is connected and it doesn't show up as an extra drive under My Computer. I guess this means some coffee must have killed the HD; or am I missing something? Help, please!

Not too sure to be honest.

The easiest thing would be to take the enclose and the drive to the shop you bought it from (you did buy from a local shop and not one of those interwebby places didn't you?) and under the guise of the enclosure not working get them to check everything out for you.

If you can't do this, you could try taking the disk to a shop and saying "sell me an enclose that works with this and prove to me it works before i buy it".

Or, to answer your question, you could diagnose the problem yourself. It seems to me (I'm not really an expert in USB enclosures) that the problem lies : a) with your PC (USB bus, OS, drivers, Plug-and-pray); b) your enclosure (incompatible firmware, power supply failure, dodgy connections); c) your HDD (fried with coffee).

You could elimate some of the scenarios by running through a diagnostic: can you hear the drive spinning (means you have power); do you get any USB mounting from the OS (I have an enclose that fires a USB hardware message when I mount with no disk); do you have drivers (you may need them for Windows < XP SP2; can you swap the HDD for another HDD. You could try booting into a linux live CD (ubuntu has lots of drivers) and seeing if the enclosure is recognised, or swap out your HD for the old one (if you really want to).

At least if you can identify where the problem is, you can rectify it. Might be a lot easier just to take it to a local PC shop and ask them if they can get anything out of it on the proviso that you will buy an enclosure from them if they tell you it's working.

Sorry, can't me more helpful.

[I'm feeling quite grumpy as I really wanted to go to the medium vs psychic and also Dr Todd's Psycrets session both on today, but I'm confined to barracks: hopefully something similar with appear on a Friday when I can get a pass </moan> ]

Thanks, aporia. I've tried connecting the case to three laptops and it doesn't work on any of them; however, it does show up under My Computer on one of the laptops, but apparently with only 8GB capacity (it's a 160GB HD!). Also, the only contents of the HD are a file called Recovery which it won't let me open. Very strange. I've exchanged the HD enclosure for another one on the off-chance that it will make a difference, but I'm not confident. I fear the worst.

I'm no hardware expert (I know relatively little compared to others in this forum) but it sounds like the part of the hard drive that tells your computer what data goes where could be dead, probably still recoverable with recovery software though

New machines now come, as a rule, with 2 partitions, a C:\ drive for data and windows and a D:\ drive or Recovery drive that can be used to reformat and reset your computer if the drive or Windows Operating System get corrupted. the second (Recovery) partition is normally used in conjunction with a set of recovery CDs that came with the machine, these will normally erase and reformat your C:\ drive. The fact theat a laptop can see one instance points to the enclosure working, you may have other drives mapped to D E F and G drives (cameras, /USB pen drives and the like) and some times these can cause enclosures to fail as they like to map themselves to D E of F drives.


As a simple test, when you power up the external drive, you should hear a whirrring (gaining in pitch slightly, this is the disks starting to spin and picking up spin speed) followed by irregular, light ditting like sounds (as the read heads start to read the 'index' and chech i can see the data), If you get a louder regular spaced clicking (roughly 2 per sec, like you used to get at the end of a vinyl album when the arm didn't return) then the drive is probably goosed...... No sound points to a power problem.

when you plug it in to the USB port, does your PC (or did it the first time you tried it) see and report a new device found? If you use XP or Vista that is. This is usually accompanied by 2 notes, going up the musical scale, that sound like ba - BA, as the system detects a new USB connection.

Hope this helps

Feel free to PM me Rep, and I'll give you my phone number, I have a window every night between 8 pm (after 2 year old finishes bath time and bed, and new son fed bathed and put to sleep) and 9 pm when we get to go to bed..... Honestly though, do feel free to call me.

G

Thank you, gents. Graeme, I'm at work right now but I will have a proper read of your post when I get in tonight and see how it goes. You may hear from me again soon!

If all else fails, and you have stuff that you really want to safe you can always go with the pricey solution of a data recovery service ( I can recommend one i Greece but I don't think it will help, so the first UK link that google.co.uk displays) :

http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk/

yddraig wrote:New machines now come, as a rule, with 2 partitions, a C:\ drive for data and windows and a D:\ drive or Recovery drive that can be used to reformat and reset your computer if the drive or Windows Operating System get corrupted.

Ladies and gentlemen, the number one reason why computer dealers suck. If I pay for an operating system I expect an operating system. On CD. Where I can store it somewhere safe. Not on a f****** hard drive which is utterly useless if you trash it!

yddraig wrote:The fact theat a laptop can see one instance points to the enclosure working, you may have other drives mapped to D E F and G drives (cameras, /USB pen drives and the like) and some times these can cause enclosures to fail as they like to map themselves to D E of F drives.

The enclosure has mapped itself to the D drive.

when you plug it in to the USB port, does your PC (or did it the first time you tried it) see and report a new device found? If you use XP or Vista that is.

Yes. It also said that the embedded drivers were successfully installed. Here's what it looks like now in My Computer...



I don't know why it thinks the HD has a 11.4GB capacity because it should be 160GB. Bit of a difference! Instead of all my stuff, the drive contains just one file called Recovery, which comes up with this message when I try to open it...



I am very confused. I can hear the HD whirring away in the enclosure, so it's not completely dead, and the laptop I'm on now has acknowledged its presence, but I still can't view and access the contents. Just that frickin' Recovery file!

Nightfall, thanks for that link. I've contacted them with my problem and asked for a quote; they've come back with two prices that match my query the closest...

Price 1: £265
Price 2: £283

Hi,
can you right click on your MY COMPUTER icon and left click on MANAGE. Under STORAGE on the resulting Computer Management window, click Disk Management and you should see all your drives, local c:\ as well as the one connected via the USB. The one connected via USB should show 2 sections one of 11 GB and the other of the rest of your old disk. The view will appear a follows, a vertical left hand area with the different tools (System, Storage (click on the + and Disk Management is there) and Services), The right hand pane is split into two horizontally, top pane shows listed drives/ partitions and the bottom pane graphically shows the physical disks inc. CD/ DVD and are labeled. If you see the 2nd drive (you'll probably see it as Disk 1 (Disk 0 being your built in drive))then all may be well. in this view you can tell the Recovery partition to accept being drive X:\ (currently D:\) and the first partition (currently trying to be C:\ or D:\ ) to accept another drive designation. To the right of the Disk 1 label you'll see the 2 partitions (hopefully), right click the big one (189 GB ish?) (the other on the right of the same bar, will be labeled Recovery) click Change Drive Letter Path and assign from the drop down box another letter (E or F or G).

This may sound like gibberish but I hope will read better when you do it on screen if you know what I mean.

Hope this helps.

G

Replicant wrote:Nightfall, thanks for that link. I've contacted them with my problem and asked for a quote; they've come back with two prices that match my query the closest...

Price 1: £265
Price 2: £283

Yes, that's why I started my sentence with the term "pricey" . It depends on how valuable stuff you have (as a software engineer and (amateur) photographer I would pay a lot more in that case).
Search for "data recovery service" on google and you will find more services, maybe some of them are cheaper (prefer the ones with no data = no payment policy).
However think of it as a last resort if all else fails.

One other thing you could try - download a Linux ISO, burn it to CD as an image then use it as a live CD to boot up your PC. I suppose it's just possible that Linux may find files that Windows can't.

I've been trying out three Linux versions as live CD. Puppy is very user friendly and only 100 Mb to download; you'll need to find your drive on the desktop and right-click to mount it. Then look in the root directory for a folder called "mnt" and your files should be in a folder called "home" - that's where they are on mine, anyway.

Barry

Graeme, thanks for that. We're making progress! Here's the screen you mentioned...



I've changed it from drive D: to drive F:

It shows up as 74.53GB, which is, I assume, the amount of space I have used up on the HD (it has a capacity of 160GB, remember). However, perhaps I have misinterpreted your instructions, but I still can't view or access the contents of the HD. Only the primary partition of drive F: (the one showing up as 11.47GB) with the Recovery file is showing up under My Computer; the main bit (the bit I need!) is still not visible. What am I doing wrong? Thanks for this; I really appreciate it.

(Alex, I found another no-recovery-no-fee website that charges between £97-175, which is cheaper than the first one but definitely a last resort if I can't get this sorted with Graeme's help).

Getting better, but can you unplug the USB drive and repeat the action. We need to make sure we are dealing with the right drive...... I have a horrible feeling ....... the recovery partition may be on your built in drive (is it a compaq you're currently using as well as the old 'coffee'd one)

Graeme