Enyar
HalfDork
11/7/13 8:30 a.m.
Just yesterday I was telling a coworker how I strongly dislike Toshiba and how the only thing I've ever bought from them that worked correctly was my portable hard drive. Then I go home and start moving some files around and it dies, my computer runs some kind of recovery/repair program and thank goodness it's working again.
Right about then I realize the last time I backed this thing up was July of 2012. All of my pictures, documents, videos,etc are on there. I also have some movies/music but I really don't care about those. So last night, I started backing everything up onto my laptop's hard drive. I check it this morning and it looks like it only got 1/4 of the way through before the hard drive crashed again. It sounds very much like a mechanical failure but I didn't want to touch it too much this morning before I figured out a game plan to get my stuff off it.
I was reading on here that putting it in the freezer might help. I also have the option that my girlfriend has the identical portable harddrive so maybe I can mix and match parts? Should I try to back it up again and hope it works before the freezer trick? Or will the freezer trick help a partially working drive? Any other suggestions?
Ya jinxed it!
Sorry, I'm no help. Good luck!
if you're handy with tools and have nothing to lose, you could swap the platters into a working drive, if the platters aren't the problem, but thats a last case scenario.
put it in the freezer for a bit and then start pulling everything off of it ASAP. its life is limited at this point and its no good as a backup. i once saved my company many $$$$ when i started backing up to the server when i heard the HD in my laptop start clicking.
And people wonder why I don't trust magnetic media for long term archiving.
I'd save both the freezer and platter swapping as last resorts. Both will certainly lead to drive destruction not long after the procedure. The drive might not even finish spinning up before the dust introduced by platter swapping causes a spectacular head crash.
Right now, I'd say you should use a file synchronization app like rsync or robocopy and make repeated attempts to recover the data.
Edit: Also try a different enclosure if you have one, those fail sometimes too.
^Nice graphic.
Another way to visualize it is if you scaled up a hard drive so that the head was the size of the Chrysler building, it would be 3" off the platter.
