External Hard Drive crash

[sonickteam2]

Hey smart people.
 
 so i have a question.  I have an external hard drive...well i have a few, but my 120gb seemed to die on me.  
 
 
 (i came home today and it was clicking, then i rebooted it and now, the power light is on , but my computer doesnt recognize the drive)
 
   I checked briefly into Data Recovery options and it seems like it would cost me $700 to recover it.  
 
 Now this is all stuff i DO have backed up, sort of, but it would take weeks to get things back where it was.  So i dont mind paying $200-$300 even but $700 is CRAZY.  
 
 Anyone have suggestions of what i can do, where i can go?
 
  Its a few years old, so no reall warranty, plut Western Digital doesnt do data recovery.
 
 thanks!

[walkonby]

stone tablets?
 
 moses thought so.

[sweetcell]

ugh, sorry to hear about that, sonick.  the fact that it was clicking is a bad sign, more likely it's a hardware failure as opposed to software/logical.
 
 you might take a gamble with a tool along the lines of those on offer here (free demos).  back in the day i would have recommended Norton Disk Doctor, but i believe it's been discontinued.  
 
 otherwise, you have to pay someone to reconstruct the disk... which is spendy, as you've already found out.

[vansmack]

So the clicking....
 
 That is usually (1) hardware failure (like a sping broke that the drive needs) or (2) the head actuator (needle) that reads the disk is off line.
 
 So, that means that you can send it in to get the data off (they will take the platter off and read it with aonther needle) or try to get the needle back on track with the disc.  I've had two external's fail in the last ten years, and with one of them I was able to bang the disc hard enough to get the needle back on track long enough to move the data to a new external drive.
 
 With the other, well, I'm still banging it every once in a while because I agree with you that the data recovery price tag is not worth what's on the drive.

[BookerT]

Originally posted by vansmack:
 
 With the other, well, I'm still banging it every once in a while

does smackette know?
 
 i had a hard drive do the clicky thing. it's gone, man. gone like walkonby's mind.

[jb1677]

Also if you plan to send it in for recovery make sure you know what their policies are, some places want a few hundred just to look and then find out they can recover some percentage of the data.  Also be careful with what they calim they can recover, recovering 95% of the data may sound great until you find out that its 95% of each individual file on the drive!