Is my HDD hosed?

[davesanti]

Hey all my Maxtor One Touch 3 160 GB appears to have taken a dump. It has been serving FF off my SLug for abour 2 months.. and tonight no power and it isnt running. I checked the power supply with my multimeter and it shows +12VDC.

The green light on the AC adapter is lit but when I try to turn on the HDD it flickers and goes faint and the HDD doesnt spin up and the light up front doesn’t come on. If I look really closely I can see the that it flashes faintly once when I turn it on…

OK, first off Back back up.. yes I know.. I have most of the drive backed up and the loss of the remaining wont be critical. I am not prepared that data away just yet.

My question is does this sound like something that a reputbale computer person would be able to deal with and recover from.. even if it has to go on to a different drive or do I give up and not waste the money trying.

Dave

[fizze]

Well, I’d plug it to a standard PC and see wether its even mountable. What filesystem did you use? Ext3? Then chances are alright, given the journal and stuff, I’d say.

If it doesn’t even mount, you have to remove it fro mthe USB enclosure and put it to a standard (P-ATA or S-ATA) connector in a PC. Other than that same game.
So maybe the USB enclosure has died, but the HD has not. I’ve seen that.

In Unix you can just dive in with fdisk and the likes, to apply a few checks to see wether data is there, anyhow.

Can’t tell you what tools to use henceforth, though.

[rpedde]

@fizze wrote:

Well, I’d plug it to a standard PC and see wether its even mountable. What filesystem did you use? Ext3? Then chances are alright, given the journal and stuff, I’d say.

If it doesn’t even mount, you have to remove it fro mthe USB enclosure and put it to a standard (P-ATA or S-ATA) connector in a PC. Other than that same game.
So maybe the USB enclosure has died, but the HD has not. I’ve seen that.

In Unix you can just dive in with fdisk and the likes, to apply a few checks to see wether data is there, anyhow.

Can’t tell you what tools to use henceforth, though.

If you get to that point and decide the drive is toast, it sounds like may be electronics, and not the drive itself.

One thing worth trying is to order the exact same drive, and swap the pcb on the bottom. That of course would only work if that’s what’s broken, not the motor or anything inside the drive.

Worth a shot, and you need to buy a replacement anyway, so… Does probably void your warranty on the drive, though.

— Ron

[davesanti]

Thanks guys, it is clear to me a hardware issue not related to the drive itself. I will try a couple of different angles and report back.

Dave

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