Shane: Just quickly seconding Deco's excellent recommendations. When external drives fail, the most common problems are 1) the connection between the power supply brick and the case has gone bad, 2) the power supply brick itself has gone bad, 3) the data connection port on the case (especially if it's a mini USB) has gone bad.
If the drive mechanism has indeed gone bad, it will generally start making some kind of unusual noise. When drives 'crash,' that is not usually actually electro-mechanical failure, but rather corruption of the directory structure, making the drive unreadable by the OS. The data is still there, but the drive has messed up its record of what is where and what goes with what. If you're on a Mac, Diskwarrior is the state of the art tool to rebuild the directory. The utilities from ProSoft (Data Rescue) / SubRosaSoft (Filesalvage) -- basically the same code under two different names -- are the best known tools to retrieve files from disks with totally trashed directories. So, after moving the drive mechanism into another external case, or into the computer case itself, just because it doesn't show up on the desktop doesn't mean it's dead. That is, having gotten around a power or communication problem, you may still have a corruption problem. On a Mac, you'd check to see if System Profiler or Disk Utility or Diskwarrior or Data Rescue can see the drive. If none of those can see the drive, it's probably toast and a candidate for that expensive data recovery service if you really need the content. But, if one of those utilities can see it, try Diskwarrior to recover the directory and if that doesn't bring it back try to retrieve files with Data Rescue / File Salvage. On Windows, a drive that is not mechanically dead should show up under My Computer / Properties / Hardware, or under PC-Wizard or under Everest Ultimate Edition. I am not familiar with Windows recovery utilities, but I'm sure Paragon or Acronis have something (I'd avoid Norton). _______________________________________________ FrameWorks mailing list [email protected] https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
