external drive dead

[Moridam]

well the long and short of it is, i've got a WD usb/firewire/esata drive that's been acting up recently. over the past couple weeks, every few days the drive would randomly unmount. i'd power my laptop down, unplug the drive, and let it sit for a while before reconnecting it, and then it'd be fine for a few more days.

well, it just did the unmounting routine again, but now neither windows nor osx will pick it up. the drive doesn't do much of anything now, but you can hear it try to spin up every now and then. it's pretty obvious at this point it's probably not going to be usable in any meaningful sense.

basically what i'm wondering is whether or not there's anything i can do to recover the data on there (barring sending it off to a professional data recovery service, i don't have that kinda cash to throw down). i'm not averse to cracking the enclosure open and pulling the actual drive out, i assume it should be able to be connected to a PC via sata or something? any idea if it sounds like a problem with the actual drive itself, or something wrong with the enclosure?

it served as my media storage and backup, and i'm really, really cringing at the thought of having to rebuild/re-rip my entire music collection D:

edit- forgot to mention, i've ruled out cabling issues, as i've tried half a dozen various USB/firewire cables to no avail

[Caiyuo]

What I've frequently heard about externals is that it's usually the enclosure and not the drive that dies so opening it and using it as a regular hard drive to recover should work, but I've never had to do that and this is just what I've heard. Just wanted to mention that to get you started, but definitely wait for some others who know better to chime in beforehand just in case.

[Furtwangler]

similar thing happened to me a month ago with a maxtor drive I own. The most common case as Caiyuo mentioned is when the usb controller in the enclosure goes bad. My drive progressively started unmounting itself until it no longer connected anywhere. (it had firewire or usb and firewire went first then USB)

Take the enclosure apart and just pop it in a pc. The drive should be completely useable. If you don't have a pc like I did (only a laptop atm), go to amazon or newegg or whatever and get an IDE or SATA (whatever your drive has) to USB adaptor so you can get it off to another drive.

[Killgannon]

ok well, i cant find a link for it, but i have a thing that you can buy somewhere (idk it was given to me for my job) that will allow you to attach any type of drive (ide, SATA, laptops, etc) to your computer via USB, if you can find one, and you dont have a regular pc, then it would help you out

[Furtwangler]

searching on amazon/newegg/tiger/w/e for ide to usb or sata to usb will get you what you need.