Reviving my MyPassport external hard drive
Hi,
My external drive stopped working a few months ago. It would spin without making any sound in particular, but it wouldn't be recognized by any PC and OS. On Linux and on Windows, it does show up when I run the lsusb command on Linux or when I open the device manager on Windows, but it seems like it's not seen as a hardware. Today, I took it apart to see if there was something I could do about it. Unfortunately, it doesn't have SATA, but IDE connectors, and I'm not comfortable with these. I'm adding pictures, I hope this will help. I'm still able to connect the USB cable that came with it (I also tried another one) but is there anything else that I can try to be able to recover data at least.
Thanks
UPDATE : It seems like there is no mouvement inside the hard drive. I just tried to plugin another 2.5" hard drive via USB, and I noticed a huge difference in terms of vibration and noise. The WD has almost no vibration at all, and it does a little buzz. So... Does it mean that the hard drive is dead?
Questa è una buona domanda?
4 Commenti
That doesn't look like a regular IDE connection to me. Maybe someone else will know what kind of connection it is.
da seantolle
It is not an IDE connector. As far as I know, this connector is for diagnostics only.
These drives are SATA internally, but have the SATA-USB converter built in and can only be accessed through the USB port. I once converted a similar drive to SATA (it is now sitting inside my desktop machine as an internal SATA drive) because the USB interface had flaked out. However when you do this conversion you say goodbye to any data that's on the drive, because the USB interface appears to contain some sort of hardware encryption and the data will be scrambled even if you do not explicitly enable the encryption by setting a password on the drive.
da Flying Dutchman
This is Western Digitals way of making it harder to repair, upgrade, or recover data from external drives. They want you to buy a new one, or send it to them for data recovery and repair.
da LS Computer Systems
Thanks for your replies. I just updated the post. There seems to be no active inside the hard drive.
da Andre