External HDD Failure.

I have a 500gb external Hard Drive. I use it to store my music, videos and any CD/DVD images I have. Problem is it seems to have died on me. It started with a few bad sectors apparently giving me errors and having slow response times. I did a chkdsk on the drive. It found errors and seems to have corrected them. The drive was responsive again and worked fine.

A few days later it seems to have died. Whenever I turn it on Explorer would become unresponsive (this is something that happens when a badly scratched CD is entered into the drive). It's still recognized as a drive but so far any checkdisk attempts have failed. Is there any way to recover some of the data?

The drive is not under warranty anymore so I did gut the casing and it is a Western Digital SATA drive that is placed in the case.

 

you can try recuva, people have had success with it
http://majorgeeks.com/Recuva_No_toolbar_d6151.html

 

http://www.majorgeeks.com/PC_Tools_File_Recover_d4711.html

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Unstoppable_Copier_d2623.html

Also, you could try this if no other option works:
Place the drive in a ziplock bag, squeeze out all the air possible and place it in the freezer. Leave it in several hours, then plug it in. This sometimes helps with some hardware related problems.

 

"No mom, I'm just putting my external hard drive into the freezer."

That just sounds so weird, but I'll try it as a last resort.

 

Make sure you just put the drive in, not the external casing, as it may affect the cooling process and/or get cracked.

 

Yeah that's what I did I put the drive and not the outer casing in the freezer. Anyways that didn't seem to work. I tried taking out the drive and connecting it directly to my PC and that didn't seem to work either.

Is there any potential problems with having an IDE drive and SATA drive connected to the motherboard at the same time? My primary drives are IDE and the external was just a SATA inside a casing. Currently I have the SATA connected to my pc, and while booting it seems to recognize it, but it does not appear in "My Computer".

I did notice my RAID controller in windows isn't properly installed.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v358/SuperFriendBFG/DriveIssue.jpg

Any suggestions on how to fix that? Would the motherboard CD have the proper SATA drivers?

 

just get the updated chipset drivers from the mobo site. but keep in mind, everytime you access the drive, you run the risk of losing more and more information...you might want to think about getting an image of it first, then running recovery software from the image.

i've used active@ file recovery...it's a bootable dvd, and it will create an image of one drive and put it on another one. You do need an available hard drive/partition to copy to...It's shareware, but the version I used before let you use it for one week, not too sure about this one
http://majorgeeks.com/Active_File_Recovery_for_Windows_d2934.html