Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

Does anyone know if I can recover data from a removable hard drive that doesn't work anymore? Does anyone have any advice too? I'm nervous that I wont be able to recover anything from it.

I'd love to know how to do that myself. I recently had a 500gb drive perish that had 10+ years worth of anime I had collected. Sadly, it was a new USB 3.0 compliant drive I had purchased less than two years ago that I had condensed everything on to. Basically the overflow from my 10+ year old WD My Book 160gb drive that gets used more often and is still working great. (go figure) This is actually the 2nd USB external drive I've purchased since buying the My Book external to go belly up. At least on the first though, there were enough indicators it was about to perish that I was able to transfer my data. This most recent drive just died right out of the blue.

Piriform Recuva! http://www.piriform.com/recuva

I've used this program in the past and it's the best free program out there.

SirKrunch wrote:I'd love to know how to do that myself. I recently had a 500gb drive perish that had 10+ years worth of anime I had collected. Sadly, it was a new USB 3.0 compliant drive I had purchased less than two years ago that I had condensed everything on to. Basically the overflow from my 10+ year old WD My Book 160gb drive that gets used more often and is still working great. (go figure) This is actually the 2nd USB external drive I've purchased since buying the My Book external to go belly up. At least on the first though, there were enough indicators it was about to perish that I was able to transfer my data. This most recent drive just died right out of the blue.

External WD drives can be a pain to deal with, especially MyBook drives. I had one of those back in 2010 that stopped working only after one month because I uninstalled the proprietary software that was needed to use it.

Apparently I can recover the files if I send it to something called a white room but that would cost around $1700! I won't be able to afford anything like that so I'm probably never going to get my files back.

ToledoRailfan wrote:Apparently I can recover the files if I send it to something called a white room but that would cost around $1700! I won't be able to afford anything like that so I'm probably never going to get my files back.

That sounds like a scam to me.

Did you try the program above to see if you could get any of your data back?

ZachL wrote:

ToledoRailfan wrote:Apparently I can recover the files if I send it to something called a white room but that would cost around $1700! I won't be able to afford anything like that so I'm probably never going to get my files back.

That sounds like a scam to me.

Did you try the program above to see if you could get any of your data back?

I didn't, I actually didn't realize that it was a data recovering program. I thought it was just for storage. I'll check it out.

ZachL wrote: That sounds like a scam to me.

I was told from a computer business here in Toledo, I've been to them before several times but it is always good to be on the safe side, although I wouldn't pay $1700 just for that even if I knew for sure that it wasn't a scam.

ToledoRailfan wrote:

ZachL wrote: That sounds like a scam to me.

I was told from a computer business here in Toledo, I've been to them before several times but it is always good to be on the safe side, although I wouldn't pay $1700 just for that even if I knew for sure that it wasn't a scam.

It still sounds like a scam, though. They just want a lot of money from you to make profit on something that could literally be done either for free or at least under $100.

ZachL wrote:Piriform Recuva! http://www.piriform.com/recuva
I've used this program in the past and it's the best free program out there.

The reason why that program isn't for me is because the removable hard drive itself doesn't work, I can't put new files on it.

ToledoRailfan wrote:

ZachL wrote:Piriform Recuva! http://www.piriform.com/recuva
I've used this program in the past and it's the best free program out there.

The reason why that program isn't for me is because the removable hard drive itself doesn't work, I can't put new files on it.

What are the symptoms of it? Are you able to see the drive in Disk Management and maybe it's missing a drive letter assignment? Is it just giving a slow, constant click?