External Hard Drive - Disaster.... any ideas?

Hi All

I have just experienced an External Hard Drive failure on the device that stores all of my Astro Images.Its a Maxtor One Touch 4 - 750 GB Drive.

The Drive makes a sort of rattling sound when booting and then I can hear a series of beeps/clicks as it attempts to run. Also, it is no longer visible in "My Computer" at all.

Has anyone an idea on how I may be able to recover the data from the drive?

Help!!

Ouch... It sounds pretty bad - literally.

Have a look at the maxtor (seagate) website - they may provide a low-level utility programme that can be used for diagnostics. You may need to remove the hard-drive from the enclosure to do the full test.

If that fails, there are companies who will recover the data for you. But it isn't cheap.

I guess, having learned my own lesson from a similar failure, you should have a good backup strategy and be prepared to spend some more money on extra disks.

Dave

Steve,

I have gone through precisely the same hell and it is not fun!

Try and minimize access to the disk in the event the heads aggravate the problem. I am certain you have a problem with one or more heads.

Warranty on hard disks means very little when it comes to data recovery by the manufacturer as I found out the hard way. Best case scenario is the replacement of the hard disk.

After my second hard disk crash in 2007 with lost image files (!), I started making multiple back-ups (mirror copies on three laptops).

Anyway, if you check the archives here on IFAS, you will find my thread when I experienced the same problems as you describe and the various tidbits of information and advice others gave me using software solutions etc.

Anthony.

PS. Steve, here you go with lots of suggestions and advice: www.irishastronomy.org/forum?func=view&catid=28&id=47863 ...

OOh Nasty.
My condolences.
It sounds as if you will need to send it to a
data recovery company.

I recently bought an external drive
to store all my images on as I had a PC crash
(virus) recently and even after I had the PC looked at
it was caput and I lost a lot of work.
I try not to think about this!

Recently I bought an external drive 700mb
and I back up my work onto that fairly regularly.

It's a pain in the ***
I have one laptop for image capture,
one for processing and one for storage.

No to mention the family that use the main PC
for all the other usual stuff.
Keeping track of it all is a nightmare.
I wonder is there an easy solution to this data storage problem,
many of us imagers seem to suffer from it.

Barberskum wrote:

I wonder is there an easy solution to this data storage problem,
many of us imagers seem to suffer from it.

Frank,

There is a solution ... online backup to your website. In other words, have your website hosting service provide you with the necessary online storage for you to upload your valuable files (zipped) so that you have (1) a secure extra backup and (2) reliable backup since I suspect they have more than one backup of all the files they host.

Anthony.