External HD issues

[Elcura]

This morning when I woke up, my PC wouldn't detect one of my externals, it keeps saying the device has malfunctioned and wants me to reformat it...

Now, this drive has a lot of stuff on it (including important work) so I absolutely don't want to reformat it and lose all that. Is there anyway to fix this or sort it out? Usually I turn my PC off at night (including from the mains... which I do because of bills) and switch it back on in the morning or evening. And for a while now it's been stable (though sometimes it has issues being detected on other PCs).

Any solutions or fixes, or am I fucked? I've tried multiple ports, tried it on my PS3 and nothing seems to change, I haven't tried it on another PC yet though. Running Windows 7 64 bit.

Edit: tried some power issue things (like taking the plug out, then plugging it back in, then plugging in the USB port) and now it kiiinda recognizes that there's a drive there (says this unit can perform faster with 2.0). So now it sees there's a drive there (with the right drive directory name), is there any way of recovering what's on it? I truthfully just need to access it once to make notes of what was on there and grab my important files.

[rezn0r]

what exact model is it? i'd probably try taking it apart and using it as a regular drive to at least save the important stuff. i've had many drives that lasted long after they "failed" as an external, cavalry drives come to mind. new enclosures are cheap.

[Elcura]

Pretty sure this is the right one.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/219616

[chiyio]

you could boot off a live linux disk and see if it has better luck mounting/repairing it. If you have no luck with that, can try it internal like rezn0r said. For the future, I don't think I'd get a fanless noname external like that.

Hope you can recover your data

[Elcura]

Any you'd recommend? I've tried lots and in my experience, they all fucking fail sooner or later. I just hope to get a good HD that has some life in it lol

[OWS_Tonx]

I'm not as savvy as chiyio, but I've only ever used Western Digital and Seagate and I've never had a problem with them.

[Cephius]

Any you'd recommend? I've tried lots and in my experience, they all fucking fail sooner or later. I just hope to get a good HD that has some life in it lol

WD are my brand of choice but you should realize that *all* hard drives fail sooner or later, especially the ones that are constantly in use. Most drives come with a feature that will automatically spin down the drives when not in use - it can be annoying when it takes 5-10 seconds to spin up the drives, but it can also add years to the life of the drives. That said... if you have data you can't live without you should be backing it up!

[Elcura]

WD are my brand of choice but you should realize that *all* hard drives fail sooner or later, especially the ones that are constantly in use. Most drives come with a feature that will automatically spin down the drives when not in use - it can be annoying when it takes 5-10 seconds to spin up the drives, but it can also add years to the life of the drives. That said... if you have data you can't live without you should be backing it up!

Good advice, I'll look into WD externals, and I'm aware that most drives fail eventually... I can only hope that when they do fail they give me enough warning to get my shit the hell of them. Anyway, I'm gonna order some discs and shit to back my stuff up on.

[ReddwarfX]

WD are my brand of choice but you should realize that *all* hard drives fail sooner or later, especially the ones that are constantly in use. Most drives come with a feature that will automatically spin down the drives when not in use - it can be annoying when it takes 5-10 seconds to spin up the drives, but it can also add years to the life of the drives. That said... if you have data you can't live without you should be backing it up!

can such a feature cause a crash, or a reboot of a PC if that drive is being used for the OS? i think my drive does this, and everytime in the past that ive heard that sound, it always rebooted
i have it as a 2nd drive in my new PC and i hear it every now and again, but no crash/reboot issues.

[bungiefan]

All of my hard drives that have failed have done so suddenly with no warning to save any data I didn't already have backed up. They work great until they just disappear. That's why you keep backups. Yesterday was World Backup Day.

Any file you don't have two copies of on two different drives is a file you don't care about.

That's the rule for this. A backup will cost you less money than sending the drive off to DriveSavers or the like for recovery. If that drive is dead, you're not getting the data off now. Keep your hard drives in pairs and have them synced up, possibly as a mirrored RAID.

[Elcura]

So to follow up on this, I managed to get the important stuff (and some not so important stuff) off my external before I shut down. But recently I'm having problems with quite a few different ones. The most reliable of the bunch works perfectly, but the one I mentioned earlier seems to work randomly. Sometimes my computer won't recognize it, sometimes it will instantly (and when it does it works like a charm). But my other external started having the same issues, though not as extreme (it usually only needs to be rebooted once for it to work).

So I'm wondering if this might not be a drive issue so much as a mobo/usb issue?

[viperlasson]

Have you tried using a different USB cable to attach from your drive to your computer? I had similar external issues and it was solved with a new USB cable.