saving harddrives

I have two laptop harddrives in portable usp plug and play enclosers. one is 60 gb7200rpm and the other is 80gb5400rpm. both drives were working wonderfully, but then one of them got dropped while running. the strange part is that both drives stopped working. at the same time. the 80gig drive (not dropped) spins when plugged in and gets recognized by the computer, but the computer has a little popup window that says that the hardware had an error while installing and does not show up in my computer. the 60gig drive (dropped) spins, but is not recognized by the computer at all. the activity light on the encloser of the 60gig drive turns green initially, then turns red. on the 80gig drive, it stays green all the time.

is there anyway to:
A: Reuse ether drive
B: Recover data from ether drive

the data is media, and not all that inportant, so if the drive had to be wiped clean to be able to make it work right, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. any ideas?

Have you tried any recovery software?

My drive would spin too, but the volumes on it wouldn't show up.



However, I managed to recover my stuff, using getdataback, and some other stuff.

Also, go into the control panel>admin tools>disk management, or somesuch, and see if you can see the drive.

If it turns up as inactivated, and you don't mind losing the data, try and activate and repartition it.


Dunno' about the other, if it doesn't spin.


If the warranty is out, try and find out if the drive inside is a regular ide drive, I understand the drive inside sometimes is, if yours is, and the usb controller bit is broken, the drive might still be ok.

Have you tried a different USB port for both of them, and also see if it works on other computers.

I would suggest that the dropped drive sounds permanently damaged, hence the red light.

For the other drive, it sounds like the failure of the dropped drive has convinced the system that it too has failed.

Go to Disk Management (Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management), that should tell you what's wrong. Re-initialise the disk if necessary. Then recreate and format partitions as required.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SnnY

Dunno' about the other, if it doesn't spin.

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both drives spin- if you hold it in your hand you can feel it spin.

I have tried a couple of differnet usb ports, with and with out the second usb port power adaptor. thanks for the ideas, I will have to download some of that software and try that

Errm, I didn't read your first post properly. Thought you had a couple of lacies or something.

Eithre way you could try and connect them to an IDE connector, there are adapters for laptop hds.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SnnY

Errm, I didn't read your first post properly. Thought you had a couple of lacies or something.

Eithre way you could try and connect them to an IDE connector, there are adapters for laptop hds.

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got three different ones- I have a little dignostic IDE or Laptop IDE to USB converter cable that i was using to access the drives for a while, and now each of the drives are in a little aluminum encloser. tried all three. (I had ordered the enclosers but they hadn't been delivered when the drives died.)

ran the disk managment out of control panal, couldn't find the external drive, did find 23gig of unpartioned space however. any other software that could help?

One thing you can try, to get the drive that wasn't dropped to work, is, if Lynx is right, and the system has been convinced, as he says, that a working drive isn't working...

...Is to go into the control panel, and do an add/remove hardware, tick the box that says "show hidden" (I may get the words wrong 'cos I don't have an english OS, but you'll see what I mean) and then remove every entry that has to do with either drive.

After that you reboot, and you try to connect the drive that wasn't dropped.


This is a bit odd, and shouldn't do much, but sometimes it can sort things out.