Hello everyone!
I'm experiencing some trouble with my external harddrive...
It's about 3 years old now, I mostly used it for backups of photos but recently used it in combination with a raspberry Pi to create a network drive.

I noticed recently that the Movies folder in it wouldn't show up on my TV, thought it was a raspberry pi issue and a reboot of the pi often fixed it.

Now, some time later, I can't access any folders anymore on the drive. I attached it to my computer via USB, sometimes the drive turns up, sometimes it doesn't, but when it does I can see the size of the drive, the amount of free space, and even see the folders in the root of it in windows explorer.
However, if I try to open any of those folders or files, it loads forever and nothing happens. The busy light on the harddrive is also constantly on...

It spins up correctly and there are no strange sounds coming from the drive. When I remove the USB cable from the PC the drive spins down.
I tried opening disk manager but it loads forever.
When I remove the drive from the case and attach it to the PC via SATA BIOS gave me "RESET PORT ERROR!"

There are some photos on there that I Really want back.. (Yet wouldn't want to pay 500 dollars for professional recovery, they're not worth that much)
Yesterday I even managed to open the photos folder and I was able to browse to more folders as well, but the busy light kept on constantly and I was unable to retrieve any files from it... I searched the internet for a long time but I couldn't find anything resembling my problem, I came across this website so I thought to try it here, Hope someone can help me!

First off, you should know that, that particular model has the highest failure rate of any drive on the market. Backblaze found that model to have a 39% annual failure rate, so it's almost certainly failed.

From what you're describing I'd wager to bet that you've got an issue developing with the media cache, which will get worse each time the drive is powered on until it finally stops responding all together.

It should be an easy case for a professional to handle at this point. Depending on your location it may only cost around $300 to recover. Perhaps less if you just have them disable the media cache and do the imaging yourself.

Short of pro recovery your best be would be to try and use ddrescue to image the drive onto another healthy drive. Here's a tutorial I wrote that can help with how to use ddrescue: https://www.data-medics.com/forum/how-t ... -t133.html

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Thanks for your reply,
By media cache do you mean the disk buffer? I haven't heard of media cache and can't find information about it.

In your tutorial it says:
"it's imperative that you actually direct SATA connect the source drive (one your recovering data from) to the computer"
But whenever I directly connect it, "RESET PORT ERROR" comes up and the drive is nowhere to be found (in windows). Or is this something that won't happen when using Knoppix?

What would you say my chances are if I attempt to clone it with ddrescue? And would this reduce chances of being able to recover it professionally? Also would having the drive powered on reduce chances of recovery?

Is there something I can do myself to disable the media cache?
I have a ttl to USB connector, I read that these can be connected to drives to interface with them, is there anything I can do with that to diagnose a problem or perhaps do something to get my files back / fix the problem?
Also how would a professional handle this, would the platters just be swapped to a working drive / pcb swapped from working drive to bring it back to life?

See http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?t=1579&p=8680

I confess that I don't fully understand what the commands do, or whether they are applicable to your model and firmware version. I believe they read and write the media cache, but I would feel much better about using them if I fully understood them.

Note that the commands are CASE SENSITIVE, so be very careful.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

These commands basically zero write the media cache (sys file 346).
Should be fairly safe but i would not being doing it with terminal commands.

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Web: https://www.day1data.de