Aaargh! External hard drive knackered - any data recovery recommendations?

[moorfield]

It had to happen. Been surreptitiously yanking my trusty WD passport hard drive in and out of the pc under my desk for the
last three months and finally the mini usb port on it has snapped off. With all my important stuff on it - itunes, photos (fortunately backed up), company stuff (unfortunately not),
and all my other, ahem, "files".

Anyone recommend any good data recovery people. I tried data recovery direct as first port of call but they quoted £265.

My own stupid fault though. Ho hum.

[stek]

Can you not just dismantle it and stick in a new enclosure?

Ohh, WD Passport - u might be lucky with that - or it might be one of those with a soldered on mini-usb connector to the disk itself - neighbour had one. Take it apart tho first.

[TykeMerc]

It will very probably be an ordinary laptop drive inside the WD Passport housing. I'd imagine that with a bit of gentle persuasion you can open the passport casing.

You can get external drive casings off eBay for bog all that take drives. It's worth a go as odds are the drive is fine.

[Clippy]

^ WTS

And I'm sure there must be loads of info and/or YouTube videos with details of how to do it.

If you do need to send it away for data recovery, I can recommend DiskLabs.

[moorfield]

or it might be one of those with a soldered on mini-usb connector to the disk itself - neighbour had one.

Yup that's the one, about 5 years old now, the mini-usb looks soldered onto an internal pcb.

My local laptop repair man reckons he can put it into an external case for me.

[moorfield]

You can get external drive casings off eBay for bog all that take drives. It's worth a go as odds are the drive is fine.

Yeah the drive is fine I'm sure of that.

[stek]

Yup that's the one, about 5 years old now, the mini-usb looks soldered onto an internal pcb.

My local laptop repair man reckons he can put it into an external case for me.

If he can - good stuff. I had said neighboughs WD apart and really it's no different than connecting the usb-mini to normal cable. His was fuked, disk was clicking and whirring but never appeared to the OS so I gave up - beyond me. If u could take out the the USB to SATA bit out things might be easier - must be ur data guy can.

[Fred Bloggs]

I agree, I took a Toshiba external hard drive apart after it stopped working. Inside the enclosure is a standard 2.5" HDD. All that had happened was that it had become detatched from the connector inside the case due to being knocked. I'm sure the disk inside your case will be just fine. You may have to damage the case to get inside but that is small beer really.

[wobbegong]

Yup that's the one, about 5 years old now, the mini-usb looks soldered onto an internal pcb.

My local laptop repair man reckons he can put it into an external case for me.

If you've got

other, ahem, "files"

on there you might want to do the job yourself.

[gingerjedi]

I had the same thing happen to me, I was getting used to chkdsking my external drive as it was always cocking up then one day it didn't work. MFT and MFT mirror corrupt.

I used this: Data Recovery Software, Solutions, Tutorials, Forum - ZAR Data Recovery

Be patient with it and sift through what it finds and you should get it all back, I got all 200GB worth of music, photos and movies back using that tool.

The only trouble I had was finding enough disk space to save what it found, I only had 2x 80GB internal drives and a reboot would have meant starting the process all over again which took about 6 hours IIRC? It was the excuse I was looking for to by a 1TB NAS.

Edit: I really should read the entire post before diving in... the drive will be fine as others have said.