Broken Hard Drives Question...What to do with them?

V

VR_Productions

Active member
I have had 4 broken external firewire drives (Lacie of course) sitting around for a couple of years now. I know they are beyond warranty and I am pretty darn sure they are fried. I have never pulled myself to throw them away though, just in case.

What would you suggest as the best way to test them to ensure they are gonners before I toss them?

I was thinking I should remove them from their enclosures and place them in another enclosure and see how they do. I know most if not all, may not even even be recognized on my macs. If not should I toss them?

If they are recognized and I cannot retrieve anything with Data Rescue app, should I initialize and then continue to use them?

Any thoughts on how to deal with dead drives and testing to make sure they are in fact dead and cannot be retrieved would be helpful.

At this point I don't remember what was on them so I do not want to pay any big bucks to recover just in case someone points that out.
 
There's a decent chance it's just the enclosure. I've had enclosures go out on me before, but the drive inside was completely fine. Try pulling the drives and connecting them directly to a PC or Mac.

Even if the drives still won't be recognized, they may still be salvageable at no cost to you, depending on how much time and effort you're willing to put toward rescuing the data on them. For instance, if your computer can "see" that there's a drive there, but just won't read the data on it, you can make an image of it with something like dcfldd and extract files using foremost. This type of data recovery is best done in Linux, as there are many free tools available to you. I can ramble on with other options if your drive is even worse off, if it gets to that point. :) Amazingly enough, your freezer can work wonders on a non-functioning hard drive. ;) I can provide more details if that's the case.
 
Take them out of the enclosure and hook them up directly to the motherboard. If they work then the enclosure is bad. If not then you could possibly install a new drive in the enclosure to salvage it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top