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Help rescue my hard drive

S

Sudo KU

Junior Member
So I took my 1TB WD external hard drive to in-laws house, to share pics;
stepped outside for a while, came back and someone had connected the laptop power supply to the hard drive. hard drive wont light up anymore. Question is: What's The Odds Of Getting My Data Back ? 😳 Thanks
 
If what's on the drive is important enough to you, there are data recovery companies that can retrieve your info from the platters, but they're usually pretty expensive. The one thing in your favor is that you probably fried the electronics, not the actual data on the platters.

Good luck. 🙂
 
Come to think of it, try phoning Western Digital's tech support at their toll free number. They may be able to repair/replace the electronics in your drive or move your platters to another chassis. I don't know if they do that, but if so, it may cost less than using a data recovery company.
 
You may be able to take apart the external drive and pull the HDD from the enclosure. Many of those are just an IDE/SATA adapter with a case around the drive. Put the drive in a regular machine and it may boot up.
 
"Lighting up" is purely a function of the enclosure. I would also tend to agree that it's probably shot (outside of a data recovery tech working on it) but the LED is purely controlled by the electronics of the enclosure.

I have an enclosure at where the leds no longer function but you can still feel the drive humming.
 
I plugged a wrong power supply into an external drive and it smoked an IC
on the drive itself. Luckily I found someone on Ebay selling the same board/firmware
for that model drive. Replaced the board and the drive worked and I recovered the data.

Hopefully yours is ok! 🙂
 
StormSide said:
I plugged a wrong power supply into an external drive and it smoked an IC
on the drive itself. Luckily I found someone on Ebay selling the same board/firmware
for that model drive. Replaced the board and the drive worked and I recovered the data.
Click to expand...
I've read reports saying that simply replacing the PCB board on recent, large, hard disks may not work anymore. But I haven't tried it myself.
 
Had a 2.5" portable HD come in this way just last Friday. It wouldn't light up anymore and the owner wondered if we could get data off. We first recommended letting us try to get the drive to work. Needless to say, after prying the case off to find the little 2.5" sata drive and putting it into one of our tech machines it worked without a hitch. So instead of 500$ recovery services, he just paid for one of our 2.5" external USB enclosures and was on his way in 30 minutes.
 
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