I will appreciate if anyone with experience in such situation can provide a feedback to this situation where it appears that I have lost a great deal of data.
Yes, I should have more than one copies of data, should have used similar solutions like skydrive etc. and I didn’t. I just sat on having one backup and kept on planning to get another external drive and use of cloud for backup and I suffered the consequences.
No physical harm was done, hard drive just went unrecognized while sitting at a calm and cool place while permanently connected to a desktop system.
I have tried changing the USB port, uninstalling usb controllers and rebooting the machine to get them freshly installed, changing the USB cable (a freshly new one) and replacing of power cable etc. And I have checked this on two other laptops with no success
In all cases, I see the external disk connected as a usb device showing at device manager level but it never appears as a drive in computer management console so as mounted or unmounted so, I can’t see it it in list of drives at “My Computer” level.
The sound of drive is perfectly ok. I am afraid that the disk has failed. Is the expensive data recovery the only option for me at the moment?
Any expert suggestion will be greatly appreciated.
what version of windows are you running? If you are on windows 7 right click on my computer, and then click on manage. There should be disk management where it should show you if the disk is being recognized as a disk and you should be able to change the letter of the drive to see if it appears.
I had it checked at local Staples store and they confirmed there is no physical damage so there are high chances that data is not lost. The issue seems to be internal power circuit. It could be a fried diode or a bad controller or some thing of that sort. Not so cheap to get it fixed since this can only be done at a data recovery lab facility
Okay, so what I gather is that in device manager you see 1) 'usb mass storage device' which appears/disappears as you plug/unplug your removable drive. 2) the hard drive sounds normal, as in you can hear it spin normally.
It's possible the hard drive is okay but the usb circuitry is damaged. You should be able to disassemble the enclosure, remove the drive and connect it directly to your computer. If connecting it directly is not an option, then you can purchase a new generic enclosure and transplant the drive in the new enclosure. I would recommend that you connect the drive directly to your computer first.
If the computer recognizes the drive and displays your data, then great, if it detects the drive but doesn't display data, then you can use recovery tools to pull data out (do not run chkdsk, it will alter the structure). If the drive isn't detected then you have a bad controller, you can try to source an identical drive so you can swap the boards and continue further testing.
try using it on another PC to make sure that its not the PC acting up ..
then there are plenty of HD recovery software out there .. ranging from free to around $20-$30. I have used some in the past with complete success .. and that is if your hard drive is spinning ..
pm me if you like and i will send you more totkay .. nothing to worry if its still spinning ...
Do you have a Mac or an apple store nearby (last resort) where you can go and plug it one of the display Macs? I had it happen to me once where I had jerked the cable when I was putting BIT encryption on my external drive and my MBP was able to read the drive.
PS I think that the option to show if any drive is connected should be on, but you can turn on the setting to show any hard drives etc in Finder settings.
PS 2 You could try going the cheap man's Mac route by using a linux virtual machine (Linux MATTE is very window's friendly user experience). There are free .iso files available that you can install after installing Virtual Box (free).
Take the darned drive out of the USB casing and plug it in directly inside the computer. That would give you a sure shot answer if the drive has gone bad. If the case doesn't open properly, take a flat-head screwdriver and a hammer to it. Seriously.
