data recovery from external hard drive

[janefield]

I have two external USB hard drives attached to my PC
and one of them, an Iomega 500 Cb, seems to have packed up. The power light is on but the computer
does not recognise that the drive is connected to it. There is at least 400
Gb of data on it that I would like to recover. I have
disconnected and reconnected it, isolated it from the mains,
swapped over the signal leads (in each case the other drive works, the Iomega doesn't, so it's not a faulty lead), tried different USB sockets, all to no avail. The fault seems to lie in the hard drive itself. It is still under guarantee, but the store only offers to replace not to
recover the data. Can anyone please advise as to what to do?

[minidv2dvd]

you have a choice to make. try and recover the data and void the warranty by opening the enclosure or get a new drive for free.

if you want to try for the data - remove the hard drive from the enclosure and connect it to the motherboard with a sata or ide cable, depending on what type of drive it is. if you can't hook it direct to the motherboard then a hard drive sata/ide to usb device will be needed. like this, or any number of others.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119152&cm_re=usb_to_serial_ad...-152-_-Product

[mail2tom]

It probably depends on what is worth more to you: the cost of the hardware (since it's still under warranty) or the contents of the drive. Here's a long story of my experience with a Western Digital external drive. What I did was carefully open the external drive case, carefully remove the hard drive (it was an IDE), and connected it back to my computer on an unused IDE channel to see if it would be recognized (making sure it's set to Master or Slave as required). My setup wasn't very pretty since the drive was "dangling" outside the computer and not mounted inside the PC case. If the drive is recognized by the BIOS at boot up and then the OS, then data/file recovery might be possible. In my case the drive was recognized by the BIOS, but there was data corruption so Windows gave me a variety of read errors when I tried to copy files. Since I really wanted to get at least some of the data back I purchased another external drive that had USB and Firewire and connected it to the PC via a Firewire port, then booted this configuration up with a Linux LiveCD (I think it was Knoppix, but others will work as well or are easier than Knoppix if you're not familiar with Linux). From there I was able to use the Linux copy command 'cp' via a terminal to recover most of the data from the damaged drive to the Firewire drive (yes, Linux does it better). It's a bit extreme for someone that has never opened their PC case, or hasn't used Linux, but I've done data recovery before (but not at home), so it was a matter of clearing a work space, taking time to remove the drive from the case, reconfigure that drive for my PC, and keep my fingers crossed that I could get the data. So if you really want your data back it's a possible solution. Good luck.