External hard drive help...

NETAAA

NETAAA

New member
I have a maxtor external hard drive that somehow got a virus, I took it to my computer guy that usually fixes all my computers. He told me that he couldn't even get to the files, that I would need to take it to a "specialist"
I took it to a local shop with no luck. I really want to get all my kids pictures that I have saved, anyone have any recommendations, leads, info.. I got this thing to protect all my pics, and this happens!! Help!
Thanks in advance fellow jeepers!

Eric
 
pastorwug

pastorwug

New member
There's a great company called "Drive Savers", they have been able to recover files even from drives that have been through fires.
 
M

Masjkf84

Caught the Bug
Is it just a virus or is the drive failing too?

If its just a virus you can order a USB to IDE/sata cable and attach it to a pc to run all the virus scans.

My normal free scan process is
Malware bytes
Combofix
Avg antivirus

I've had this remove dozens of viruses through my work

If the drive is failing, while it might sound odd, put it in a freezer bag and the freezer for a few hours. I've had it save a handful of failing hard drives over the years. It's only a temp fix and usually allows the drive to boot up for 30-45 minutes.
 
pvanweelden

pvanweelden

New member
I am a sys admin, and I would do exactly as Masjk just said above

Sent from my LG-C800 using WAYALIFE mobile app
 
NETAAA

NETAAA

New member
Well it's drive failure too.. The last guy took it all apart so I have all the pcs in a bag...
 
GuillaumeC91

GuillaumeC91

New member
NETAAA said:
Well it's drive failure too.. The last guy took it all apart so I have all the pcs in a bag...
Click to expand...

If the parts are all in a bag, then let's hope the guy knew what he was doing because a simple virus would of been way easy to remove from the drive. An external drive isn't like your computers drive. Its hard for most virus to run of something that is not OS based.

If the drive is apart, I'd suspect the arm motor or the plate readers themselves. In that case, the disks themselves should still be good and still be holding your data. The fix? Find the exact same drive (with working arm and reader), take it apart and swap disks. That's what most data recovery shops are going to do. If the disks were corrupted, then a FAT or NTFS scanning software can rebuild the sectors back with correct data, but in some cases a small percentage of the data can be lost if it was overwritten.

Good luck!
 
NETAAA

NETAAA

New member
GuillaumeC91 said:
If the parts are all in a bag, then let's hope the guy knew what he was doing because a simple virus would of been way easy to remove from the drive. An external drive isn't like your computers drive. Its hard for most virus to run of something that is not OS based.

If the drive is apart, I'd suspect the arm motor or the plate readers themselves. In that case, the disks themselves should still be good and still be holding your data. The fix? Find the exact same drive (with working arm and reader), take it apart and swap disks. That's what most data recovery shops are going to do. If the disks were corrupted, then a FAT or NTFS scanning software can rebuild the sectors back with correct data, but in some cases a small percentage of the data can be lost if it was overwritten.

Good luck!
Click to expand...

Thanks for The replies guys, I'll take a pic of all the parts I have just to give you an idea.. Now that I remember, the problem with the drive wasn't a virus it was malfunctioning.. Sometimes when I would connect it, the computer couldn't read it but after disconnecting and connecting it back it would... After some time though, nothing I did made the computer read it. Even on my laptop.
 
NETAAA

NETAAA

New member
ImageUploadedByWAYALIFE1375465845.812853.jpg
This is what I have left.. Can I buy smthg to connect to it how it is now, and try to fix? Or do I just try to find a company to do it?
 
NETAAA

NETAAA

New member
Masjkf84 said:
I'm on my phone so can't read to much on the cable. But this should be what you need.

http://m.bestbuy.com/m/e/product/detail.jsp?id=mp1307116937&skuId=1307116937&pid=mp1307116937
Click to expand...

And this will connect straight to the hard drive? After connecting it should the computer read it? Or do I have to dig a little deeper? I'm not that advanced on my computer skills, do you think I can mess anything up? Don't want to delete anything on The drive by accident..
Thanks for the help!
 
JKAnimal

JKAnimal

Caught the Bug
NETAAA said:
And this will connect straight to the hard drive? After connecting it should the computer read it? Or do I have to dig a little deeper? I'm not that advanced on my computer skills, do you think I can mess anything up? Don't want to delete anything on The drive by accident..
Thanks for the help!
Click to expand...

That kit will give you the abilty to connect the drive to your PC just like it was back in the case via the USB cable. It should basically act like they never took it apart, if the hardware is working properly.

If the disk is having hardware problems you still may not be able to get the files off. Definitely would try the freezer trick! It would be my guess that if the computer guy (assuming he is a good computer guy) couldn't fix/retrieve the files there is probably a pretty good chance you may not be able to recover files without sending it to a specialist. Be prepared to drop some cash though because data mining can be quite pricey, BUT the stuff you lost may be priceless.

As a general rule in the future, you should always have a backup of your backup.... Ask me how I know ;)

Good luck!
 
GuillaumeC91

GuillaumeC91

New member
NETAAA said:
View attachment 42675
This is what I have left.. Can I buy smthg to connect to it how it is now, and try to fix? Or do I just try to find a company to do it?
Click to expand...

Ohhh! That's not bad! The description I was giving you was in case of actual drive failure, this seems like only an enclosure component failure. That's good! We can't see the actual connectors from the picture but like everyone is saying, it looks like a typical SATA and a 40 pin IDE connector. Retrieving your data should be about as simple as turning your computer off, connecting the drive to the motherboard and power cable, and turning the power back on but here's a detailed article and video: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-install-sata-hard-drive/

Once the drive is connected to the PC, copy the files off to another location and you're done. As its been mentioned already, backups are only useful when there's a lot of them. This is why enterprise styled backups use mirroring.

As for the SATA cable, go for something cheap. Ex: http://www.newegg.ca/SATA-eSATA-Cables/SubCategory/ID-2834

Let us know how it turns out!
 
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