From: Ann Sanfedele
My 500 gig external harddrive crashed tonight... guess where all my
recent digital photos are?
This happened after I loaded PEF's onto it a couple of hours ago... a
couple of weird things happned... the PEntax Lab thing said there was a
loading error.
I know its not the USB port because I was able to attach my 80 gig
external to it and use it.
WHen I plug in the drive it says USB DEVICE NOT RECOGNIZED...and says
the divice has malfunctioned.
aarrrgggh!
Never had a drive crash on me before ...
I connected it to the old puter to see if I could revive it but no,
nothing...
WHen I goto the trouble shooting page it tells me I should try and
reconnect it (duh) and if that doesnt work "REPLACE THE DEVICE"
the device is a Seagate free agent 500 gig drive I got as a present in
2007. All my photos from the last two years are on there
The C drive was getting crowded most everything I need is on the
external drive.
I sthis going to cost me a fortune to save it? is it possible there is
just a driver I need to reload?
Hugs along with info would be much appreciated
ann sad
If you are lucky it will not be the hard-disk itself, but the
electronics in the housing that translate from the USB. A good computer
repair shop may be able to remove the drive from the housing and install
it in another USB housing so that the disk is recoverable.
My experience with Seagate drives is they're fairly robust and high
quality. Given a choice of brands, I prefer Seagate for the external
drives I've built for myself. Given that experience, I'm hopeful it will
prove to be the housing rather than the drive.
I can't tell you how much a shop in your area would charge for this kind
of work. Around here, I'd *guess* it might cost under $150, but I could
do this kind of work for myself if it happened to me, so that really is
only a guess. Perhaps, not even a very well informed one.
If it's the hard-disk itself, recovering the photos is going to be
expensive. Probably prohibitively so.
For the future, you should keep TWO external drives so you can back-up
one with the other. Then if one of them fails, the least cost solution
is to replace the failed drive with another external drive and use that
drive as the new backup. I prefer Seagate over Western Digital for that.
There's nothing really wrong with Western Digital USB drives, but the
MyBook drives take a long time to mount and I've had more trouble with
Western Digital drive failures than I've had with Seagate (3:1 over a 20
year period).
Eventually, ALL hard-disks fail.
Someone is going to chime in with "It's not a backup unless it's off site!"
True.
So, you also need a plan how you're going to afford to acquire that
third drive, where you're going to keep it and how you're going to swap
drives around to keep them in sync.
I know that's hard to do if you don't have a lot of discretionary funds
available in your budget. I'm living that right now. But the minimum two
external drive setup is a lot cheaper than what it's going to cost to
have someone recover those images.
I hope it will turn out to be the least expensive kind of trouble, and
the drive itself can be installed in a new housing and made workable
again. If it is, first order of business should be to get another
external drive and copy all of the files over to it so you've got two
copies.
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