Hi, this morning i turned my computer on and one of the harddisks had disappeared from my computer. I checked disk management and it wasnt there either. Then i checked the bios and it wasnt there eitherer, (thats a real word). I plugged it into a different sata port, plugged a different harddisk into its port and swapped power leads. Other harddisks appear but the suspect one doesnt. I placed the faulty HDD into an external thingy used for swapping lots of data between HDDs, its called an icy box and has two slots where HDDs connect and it connects via usb. when its plugged in to that I can here it spin up and a light comes on showing that something is plugged in but it wont show up anywhere on the computer. Its a 3 TB disk, windows 7 64bit. Im thinking its a connector on the HDD itself most likely the sata connector. Is there any hope? Please say yes
HDD disappeared help
- Thread starter SkinSuit
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SpyderTracks
We love you Ukraine
No, if it's not being read as an external drive then it's dead.
SpyderTracks
We love you Ukraine
You can find a specialist to recover the data, but it's extremely expensive.
HDD's are extremely sensitive to dust and certain gasses and have to be dismantled in a clean environment and then mounted in a specialist device to recover data, it's a pretty involved process.
Oussebon
Multiverse Poster
That's not at all the case unfortunately; one can't rely on waiting for the click of death to suggest when it's time to think about possible HDD failures. Perhaps there'd have been info in the SMART data leading up to this? But not sure if that's something most users would look at regularly. But yeah, things die, and by the time there are warning signs, it's often already too late to guarantee the components can be used stably.
I'm going to ask it.
Do you have any copy of the data on that HDD?
Are you sure you might not have a copy squirrelled away on another device? If you have an icy box / hot swap device for HDDs, you must transfer a lot of data around.
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ubuysa
The BSOD Doctor
On the plus side, if it spins up and doesn't make any horrible sounds then all is not completely lost. That sounds more like an electronic component failure in the controller rather than a physical failure of the disk itself. The good news there is that your data is most likely still there, but the bad news is you're going to need specialist help to get it back, as Oussebon says, that's generally expensive.