Crashed external hard drive.

Straight Edge

Straight Edge

Active member
Hey, someone I know dropped one of my external hard drives. Now it doesn't work. My back-up of the movie footage stored in there crashed as well recently (a PC -- won't even power on). The external hard drive contained all of the footage from my first indie feature film "Nowhere Johnny" (which is now available to watch here: NOWHERE JOHNNY on INIDEREIGN) and losing the footage sucks because it's my first serious indie feature, now all the original footage is gone, and I want it back.

So when I plug in the external hard drive, at times makes a clicking noise and it doesn't even show up on my Mac Mini. The power light is on though. Other times, there is no noise and this message shows up on my Mac: "The disk you inserted is not readable by this computer." It pops up at least twice.

Is the footage gone forever? If not, how do I get it back?

This is the external hard drive brand: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-External-STAC1000101/dp/B0045JLPN8/
 
it is gone forever, the clicking noise is a terrible sound, it is the sound of the heads hitting the platter and the drive is a write off along with the data on it. There is a VERY expensive option that might get you something - there are companies with clean rooms that can dismantle the drive and somehow rebuild it but it costs a bomb and I can't see it working in your case.
 
As tired said, there are companies that specialize in data/HDD recovery(or attempted recovery). I recently had an external portable drive go south on me. It hasn't completely "crashed", it still powers and my computer can see the folders, but I can't really get past that(a Google search indicates that it's the read/write head/arm. It clicks/pops and beeps). The client's have all of the original video, this was just personal copies that I had made, but some of it is significant/important/valuable footage.

I contacted one of the larger companies(WeRecoverData.com) and they will do a free evaluation. Recovery starts at $700 and goes up quickly and steeply from there. It all depends on how severe the problem is. I'm going to ship mine in for evaluation and hopefully recovery, as long as it doesn't go into the "few thousand or more" range. But depending on what it is, even a few thousand dollars could be a bargain compared to completely losing footage.

RAID/multiple copies are a necessity nowadays. All of my personal still photos are backed up on multiple drives. And I've started running RAID set-ups for back-ups of things, now(it's just so easy on a MAC, connect at least two drives and tell it to make a RAID in Disk Utility).
 
just went thru this with a clients drive of stuff i did quite a few years ago. it was a 2 platter Lacie "Big Drive" 500gb's. took it to Micro Center and they sent it off and the bid if retrievable was going to be about 4k. there was about $700-$900 cost up front that is mostly non refundable. they were "unsuccessful" in their attempts to get the data off.

if the data is important then you don't really have any other option than pay the high fee and hope it works.

HD's are so incredibly cheap with a 4TB being under $200. most of my stuff is in at least 2 places and the real important stuff is in at least 3 places. also...HD's that are really "old" like data that was copied 6-10 years ago? refresh them with a clean copy install. I've recently went thru the process of about 60 older HD's (some only 40-60gb's in size) and 4 drives were hard to get to mount or other issues with the data. on all but one (above) i was able to at least get them to mount to copy the data off but could not "write" from them. i mostly used Disk Warrior and was able to breath some life into a few of them.

i ran Disk Warrior on all of them. any HD's that were really funky i erased them and did a fresh install.

lot of work but must be done if you want your data in years to come.
david
 
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