I can't freaking win (External HDD follies)

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

External hard drives. I'm cursed. Even when I get good ones, something happens and I lose TBs of data...

I got a 2TB Western Digital MyBook that has been working fine, even though by WD standards its casing is not as sturdy as its other products. Yesterday, it fell and hit the floor, and the case cracked open and the USB minijack input was damaged. The drive itself seems fine though, and I doubt any data is lost or corrupted. But I can't use the USB jack anymore to access the data.

Now, at its core, this is really a WD internal SATA drive, WD20EADS, with a USB jack soldered to the side. But I'm squeamish (and semi-ignorant) about trying to hook it up to the inside guts of a PC. Not to mention, the only tower I have handy is a work machine that doesn't belong to me, and it would be very bad if I damaged it trying to hook up the drive. Also, is doing so even possible?

WD's warranty solution is replace only, no repair. And they have third-party partners who will do the data recovery/transfer, but for an exhorbitant price. That makes their solution a non-solution.

 

[whisky]

Buy another one exactly the same, swap the hard drives over, take the broken one back, say this is how it looked when you opened it, demand your money back.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

It's still under warranty, but I've had the drive for 6 months, so that wouldn't work.

Plus I already emailed WD for their advice/options, so they have it on record.

I will get a replacement at some point, I just want to get the data safe first. I was about to buy another 2TB drive anyway, so I'm trying to time this out to cost as little as possible.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

Plus I might not want to get the exact same drive again, the drive is great but the casing is shit.

 

[whisky]

My father in law buys really cheap pcs at car boots all the time, I think you call them flea markets.

So you pick up a cheap pc for almost nothing, and instal your hard drive inside, then you dont have to worry about messing up the work pc.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

There's a doohickey (the 7-pin SATA jack) that would probably fit one end of this cable, and the other end would fit the eSATA jack on my new laptop. Would it work?

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?item=N82E16812150024

(I know it probably will, I'm just freaking out at the prospect of losing a whole external drive's worth of data YET AGAIN...)

 

[whisky]

I'll let someone else tend that question, my technicall abilities extend to replacing the fan, and not much beyond that.

 

[Further]

Is the USB jack actually soldered to the hard disks circuit board? If so you might be SOL unless you have mad soldering and electrical engineering skillz. Can you tell if there are normal SATA data and power ports on the hard disk? If there are, there is no harm in trying to hook it up to a computer as you would an internal hard disk. Being SATA, you could even do it while the computer is still on. At worst the computer will not recognize the drive, but it will not do any harm to the computer itself.

Does this drive have an additional ESATA connection? I'm guessing it might from the last link you posted. Assuming the power port is not damaged, hooking it to your laptop with that cable should work fine as well.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

Thanks. The drive only has the SATA connection besides the SB. But the SATA-eSATA cable is on its way, and I ordered a new Fantom 2TB drive as well, one with more than on external jack to avoid this in the future.

Once I dump all the data from the broken drive to the new one, I'll return it for replacement, and be sitting up to my tits in terrabytes.

*Knock wood, these things always find a way of going south...

 

[jack]

that what my wife always says...

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

Catch-22: the drive has a SATA hookup, but because it was customized as an external drive, the SATA was used by the attached card that controlled the USB jack as well as the AC power and the reset button.

So, I doubt I can use the SATA jack to connect it to my laptop's eSATA without any power going to the drive.

I guess I need a tower with a spare bay after all...

Sometimes I hate only knowing "so much" about computers...

 

[whisky]

Is there a little row of very tiny switches that you flip for master/slave configuration somewhere on it?

 

[whisky]

Is this your drive? Those row of spikes are for the jumper configuration

http://ask.adaptec.com/scripts/adaptec_tic.cfg/php.exe/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=16913

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

Hmm...yeah, that's the drive. So i can do a thingy to a couple of the jumpers and let the laptop power it? But will the laptop be able to handle it, I wonder...

Thanks!

 

[Mentalist]

I don't see any reason why you couldn't slave it to your laptop.

 

[Fucking Hell]

Awww i lost 500 GB and i hear you man. Hope you can get this solved.

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

OK -- I picked up a SATA-USB2 adaptor kit, and hooked up the drive via its SATA plugs to the laptop via USB.

It's powered up and the machine recognizes it as a WD drive, however, in Computer Mgr/Disk Mgmt, it's telling me that I have to INITIALIZE the drive before I can access it. THe choices are MBR and GPT - I realize I should pick GPT. BUT, is "initialize" different from "format"? If I take this step, am I kissing the 1.6TB of data on this 2TB drive goodbye for good? Or is initialization just sort of a handshake, and maybe my data will be there after it initializes?

IS THERE GOOD NEWS HERE?

 

[Further]

Well it does not sound good....

If it is asking you to initialize a partition table, it is likley it does not recognize the old one for whatever reason, which means that while some of your data may be intact, it might as well be a stream of random bits as the OS has no clue how it is organized.

I would try booting off a live Linux CD and attempt to mount the hard disk in that environment to make sure it is not just Windows being picky.

If two different OS's cannot access it though...

 

[Eggs Mayonnaise]

WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS HAPPEN SO FUCKING EASILY TO EXTERNAL HDDS? I HAVE A TALL PILE OF THEM WITH TB AFTER TB OF UNRECOVERABLE DATA! WHAT THE FUCK DOES IT TAKE????

 

[whisky]

Do you smoke?

Smoke and hard drives arent a good combination.