My laptop froze up today while editing photos. After restarting, my external hdd behaves exactly like the youtube video below. I haven't removed the casing like in the video, but the spinup, "beeps", and spindown are nearly identical. Any thoughts on chance of recovery?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDiCrghpjrI

Hi,

Have you had any success with recovery? I have exactly the same problem and would like to recover some of the data. I cannot believe the drive has failed. It was only 4 months old and was "asleep" (hdidle) most of the time. I have some data I need to retrieve which I cannot replace.

My drive is a ST2000DL001 which came with my GoFlex Home NAS. I am running ArchLinux on the NAS and had the drive formatted to ext3. At first, I noticed the file system appeared corrupt, some filenames were garbaged but a reboot of the NAS corrected this. Over the last few days it appeared to get much worse which prompted more frequent reboots of the NAS. Yesterday, it took a turn for the worst as I can no longer access the drive. I removed the drive from the NAS to connect up to my desktop computer (also running linux) and it doesn't get detected by the BIOS 99% of the time. The other 1%, it's detected, but then disappears and dmesg reports a load of i/o errors reading sector blabla. Or if I successfully mount it, the filesystem appears corrupted and is unusable.

I tried running e2fsck but the farthest I've gotten is 17% on pass 1 and the drive makes those same noises that appear in the video you linked. It's hard to believe the disc itself is at fault. Could this be the PCB controller? Firmware issue? Could that BSY bug be the cause? I don't want to return the NAS until I've exhausted all means of savaging the data I need.

After many, many attempts getting the computer to detect the drive, I successfully got SEATOOLS for DOS to work (I had to set my BIOS to IDE mode) and the drive passed the quick test but failed the long test about 30% into it. To me, it seems to be a PCB problem.. if only I had another drive so I could test the board on it.

I'm at a loss how to savage my data (aside paying over the odds for professional data recovery).

It's being sent to Ontrack Data Recovery today. I'll send you the report when I get it.

Thanks. I appreciate that.

You should have a bad sector, possible firmware and or weak heads.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Have you some news about your hard drive ? I have exactly same problem and I wonder if cost worth the datas.

Thanks for infos.

Alec