Hi,
I have a Samsung 80GB external USB harddrive (I found this specification: MP080H). We have it for years and despite all bad treatment it always worked...until recently. On my WinXP PC the drive would not show up on explorer, but it is present with a letter in the drive manager (which does not indicate any problem). On my new Win7 notebook the HD even has a letter in explorer but is not accessible (windows disk manager freezes with the HD plugged in). I get told that I need to format the drive first before I use it.
The systems would not boot correctly with the drive plugged in and they get very slow when the drive is connected and eventually will freeze in a way that does not even allow to shut the computer off normally. Any program that is supposed to access the drive (also disk manager) would crash/not respond in the attempt. PC Inspector data recovery crashes too, so no help from this side. I wanted to try and put the HD into another case but it seems it is so old that the connector pins are not compatible with the "newer" housings...
We were just about to set up our new computers and backup all files and just in the last minute before this happened the drive failed...Murphy! It is completely full with important data. I am working here in southern Chile and I believe a professional data recovery is only possible in Santiago and I do not want to know how much this might cost.
Any ideas how to get the data off this HD?

Thanks,
Fossi

My advice would be to try a different pc, and a different data recovery software package. You might get lucky that way.

If it's old and hasnt had the most smooth journey through life, chances are you'll probably have to get it repaired professionally... But it's fairly low capacity, so the price may not be too steep. Worth getting some quotes.

You can try to pull the drive out of the enclosure and slave the drive to a computer, if that fails I know Kepler Data Recovery in Santiago are very good, they offer a free evaluation, I wont try to do to much to the drive because that can make the drive more unstable and you will loose the data or make the recovery more expensive

Thanks for the quick response,
but that would not work. The pins in this drive are different from those of my newer external drives and also different from the notebook drives. (the newer ones have a pin and a flat part, my old one has one continuous two row pin plug) I calculated that the device must be some 6+ years old....

Thanks for the tipp with Kepler. This would be my last option. But I still hope for a "do it yourself" solution even if it involves some risk for the data. Most data on the drive are not really essential, but would be nice to have them. Santiago is 1000km away, so I would need to send it, with all the included work, time (you have no idea how much time you can spend waiting in a Chilean post office...) and risks.

Cheers,
Fossi

Thanks for the reply.
Yes, it had a hard life...My guess is that there is something wrong with the hardware in the housing (not the disc itself though) that facilitates communication with the PC. But I would need a compatible housing to find out and this might be difficult considering the age of the device.

Do you know any other data recovery software that you would recommend?

Cheers,
Fossi

Not surprising for that to show no problem, as it does almost no I/O i.e. no "test" of the drive - however to show as a drive letter in Windows Explorer, more of the filesystem metadata (FAT or NTFS) must be read. That filesystem access seems to be (sometimes) unsuccessful on that drive, based on your description.


That just means, again, that the filesystem metadata could not be successfully read, so Windows believes that there is no filesystem and hence it tries to be "helpful" and suggest that you format it, in order to write a filesystem. Of course, do NOT do that!


Therefore this all sounds like it is an IDE (Parallel ATA) interface - if you included a photo of the interface connector on the drive, then this would allow confirmation, but your description fits with it being that type of interface.


I politely disagree. While I cannot be sure from 1000s of miles away the behaviour you describe is completely consistent with a fault in the drive itself (failing heads, internal mechanical issues etc. etc), as well as the very small (nearly zero IMHO) possibility of what you guess i.e. an intermittent problem with that USB-to-PATA housing.

However, it would be very, very rare for a problem with the housing to allow a drive to seen in Windows Disk Manager, and not in Windows Explorer, because the housing itself does not behave differently for these 2 different cases. That only leaves the cause of the different behaviour to be the drive itself (i.e. some sectors are unreadable).

Therefore if you plan to go ahead with a DIY recovery attempt, you can try to get either a PCI Parallel ATA (IDE) interface card for a desktop PC (better for data recovery), or try another USB-to-PATA (IDE) adapter for a laptop (not so good for data recovery), in order to confirm that the original housing is not the cause of the problem. These types of interface are, as you say, old. (Have you tried ebay or your local equivalent?)

If (as I expect) the existing USB drive housing is OK, then you can try to use that with cloning software (search the forum for lots of suggestions for suitable software in the past), but you have less chance for success when using a USB adapter, as this adds extra (unwanted) error recovery into the process. You might be lucky...

Then you can attempt to clone this drive, ideally to another empty disk (which you need to get - 80GB or larger; it can be SATA if that is easier for you, and can be in a USB housing) and to use cloning software which will skip bad (unreadable) sectors to attempt to clone the readable sectors from your old IDE disk, onto the new (empty) disk. As I said, search this forum for "cloning software" to see many recommendations in the past - I won't waste time repeating them again here. After that, then you are likely to need to use data recovery software to try to recover what files are possible from the (partial) drive image on your clone.

There are risks of you doing DIY (again lots of info already on the forum about this) including you making an error with the cloning software and overwriting your drive; you damaging the drive with ESD or mechanical shock; your new interface card/adapter damaging the drive; the drive dying during your data recovery attempt etc. etc. but it seems to me that if (as you said) you want to try this, then read about cloning software. It would be a good idea for you to consider practicing cloning another disk, before trying your "real" problem disk.

I hope that gives you some ideas. However I don't have time to "hold your hand" through the process.

Good luck...

Hi Vulcan,
thanks for your long reply and wow! that was a lot of information! Your diagnostic is for sure better than my guess. And resuming what you recommended I get more and more inclined to get the help of professionals. I visited the website of Kepler (as recommended in an earlier reply) and they seem worth a try. Unless their price quote is outrages I better go for this before I waste lot of time trying things I am not really comfortable with. In case that it is too expensive I probably will take the risk and proceed as you recommended. In any case thanks a lot!
Cheers,
Fossi

You are very welcome and good luck!