I have a 500 gb Western Digital Sata hard drive. I usually access it by using a USB Sata hard drive reader. Whenever I start up the drive I hear it try to start spinning up but it never fully does. I can hear it making noise for about 10-15 seconds before it finally gives up and then I hear windows make the noise alert that a USB device has been removed. I did however get it to come up one time yesterday after about 20 attemps. I was able to get some of the data off the drive but it was very slow and the drive kept on mounting and unmounting itself. I have 2 USB HDD readers and they both produce the same result. Whenever I hook up the drive directly to the computer I get the "failed to install device driver" everytime. Does anyone know of any software that will be able to see the drive and get any data off it or am I pretty much screwed? I am running Windows Ultimate 7 (64 bit)
I think we can assume drive is shot had the same situation with one of my drives thankfully i was able to get most data off the drive,leave the drive internally & try a linux live cd distro,puppy is pretty small http://distrowatch.com/
I'm really not familiar with Linux. I clicked on the link you provided but have no clue what to do. Anything with windows I can usually figure out. Is there a specific live cd that I need to look for? Is "distro" the name of it? Thanks
It was a thought it most probably would be more trouble than it's worth you don't need to make the headache worse As a last resort zorin is as close as you can get to windows or mint. distro = distribution it's just a name for the different types of OS (or flavors as some call it) zorin download,burn it to disc once you have it then reboot while cd still in drive,make sure your faulty hdd is installed as well preferably internally,it's still a long shot the trick is to withdraw the data before the drive starts mounting or dismounting itself http://zorin-os.com/free.html
Whenever I install the drive internally and restart my computer with it still attached, I will get a error message before windows boots that says "disk error" or something along those lines. Then I have to press f1 I think to get windows to boot. Should I still be able to get data off it or is it dead if windows claims disk error before booting? Update I finally got the Linux puppy (slacko) cd to work. It did not recognize the drive either. No data recovery programs I have found can find the drive either. The drive only makes noise and vibrations for 10-15 seconds after being plugged in and then it is like it turns itself off. It will still be plugged in but it makes no sound, has no vibration to the touch, and stays cold. What could be causing this behaviour?
After turning it off and on through the USB reader about 100 times it finally came up. Trying to copy it to another drive isn't really working too good. It will copy for about a minute and then freeze up. Now I am recovering the drive using "Easeus data recovery wizard pro" and so far so good. It's about 70% done and appears to be working. Thanks to everyone with your suggestions. It's always nice to learn other ways of going about stuff.
should go to wd site & see if warranty is still available you'll need model & serial number to start an RMA of the hdd,its worth a shot some drives had a 5 year warranty before they knocked it back
Drive is older than 5 years I believe. What really sucks is that all of the .mp3 files off the drive copyied over to my other drive just fine, but now they will not play. They still have the mp3 file extention and are the correct size, just won't play. I have no idea how to fix them.
