possible hard drive failure

[telecom_goddess]

I have an external hard drive that is now not showing up on my desktop pc that it's plugged into. I don't know yet if this is failing or if maybe the usb port is failing on the desktop (7 year old computer or so) or what....I haven't troubleshot completely yet.

But in the case of the hard drive failure is it possible to retrieve the lost photos/music on there in any way? That's not super expensive?

Thanks in advance

[Chromatix]

As an external drive, it could be that the enclosure has gone bad but the disk inside is fine. Or, as you say, it could be the computer's end that has gone bad.

Test it on another computer. If it doesn't work there, get out the screwdriver and remove the disk from the enclosure, then find a way to test that.

If the drive's own electronics have gone - which would match the symptoms of "doesn't show up" wthout any nasty noises - then it's still fairly likely that a professional data recovery service can get the data without any trouble. They will just attach the electronics from an identical drive and read it out. I don't know how much they charge for that, though.

[telecom_goddess]

Thanks for the tip I was planning to attach it to my laptop to see what showed up there, but after shutting everything down including it in frustration, my bf booted everything back up and it works now. Just wasn't wanting to connect before...dunno. I think think my usb ports are funky cause I can't connect anything and then disconnect it without losing my wireless connection on the desktop. Why I don't have it wired into the router that's right there I don't know but that's the way it is But the wireless adapter is usb also ....again this desktop is incredibly old.

Main thing is the important shit on the external are safe and I'm now backing this stuff up online and on cd like I shoulda done in the first place Mainly some docs, music and photos. The truly irreplacable stuff would be the photos....I would be upset if I lost all those.

[charred]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...M.A.R.T._tools

Find out if that drive is actually failing or not.