External Hard Drive Dying/Dead. Please Help!

My external hard drive has been giving me cyclic redundancy check (CRC) errors for about a month, and starting yesterday, it isn't recognized by Windows at all, and the Western Digital Diagnostic program identified it yesterday as having bad sectors. Today it isn't even being recognized by that program. I looked around on Google and it looked like "SpinRite" had great results in repairing hard drives, so I gave that a try. The problem with that, is that it locks up at around 2 minutes for every test I try to have it perform. Anyone know of any other ways to fix my hard drive, or get SpinRite working? Thanks alot in advance!!!

Did manage after a month to backup all your data?

^ Nope. Stupid, I know, so let's not bash me about it.

You can't fix faulty hardware with software.

If you have a bad hard drive you are shit-out-of-luck.
Sorry for your loss.

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Originally Posted by Nickthestick91

^ Nope. Stupid, I know, so let's not bash me about it.

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Why so surly?

Jeez.

Wouldn't a low level format fix bad sectors?

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Originally Posted by zapjb

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Originally Posted by Nickthestick91

^ Nope. Stupid, I know, so let's not bash me about it.

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Why so surly?

Jeez.

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I knew I would sound like an ass when I said that, so I was gonna put a smiley face next to it. Turns out I forgot. :lol:

Sorry if I sounded like a dick. :(

Drive is dead.

Move along, nothing to see here.

The high failure rate of external hard drives nearly always leads to poor ventilation of the external enclosure. If you want to try and save some data, try removing the drive from the enclosure, put it in a ziplock bag and place it in the freezer for 24 hours. Let it come back close to room temperature, mount it inside the PC if you can (not back into the enclosure) and transfer as much data as you can to another drive before it fails again.

You might want to purchase a new drive for this purpose and temporarily mount it in one of your rom drives position so you can run three drives at a time if you don't have the sata option.

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Originally Posted by Appzalien

The high failure rate of external hard drives nearly always leads to poor ventilation of the external enclosure. If you want to try and save some data, try removing the drive from the enclosure, put it in a ziplock bag and place it in the freezer for 24 hours. Let it come back close to room temperature, mount it inside the PC if you can (not back into the enclosure) and transfer as much data as you can to another drive before it fails again.

You might want to purchase a new drive for this purpose and temporarily mount it in one of your rom drives position so you can run three drives at a time if you don't have the sata option.

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Just make sure you don't leave it in the freezer too long.
http://www.arrowsmash.com/1hd.jpg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Appzalien

The high failure rate of external hard drives nearly always leads to poor ventilation of the external enclosure. If you want to try and save some data, try removing the drive from the enclosure, put it in a ziplock bag and place it in the freezer for 24 hours. Let it come back close to room temperature, mount it inside the PC if you can (not back into the enclosure) and transfer as much data as you can to another drive before it fails again.

You might want to purchase a new drive for this purpose and temporarily mount it in one of your rom drives position so you can run three drives at a time if you don't have the sata option.

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I never would've thought that someone would use this seriously..