Damaged USB hard drive

I use a little Toshiba Netbook most of the time, with an external USB

2.5 inch Toshiba hard drive, which was perfect until I dropped the drive, which no longer works.

The Netbook tells me my USB device is not working. Plugging into a desktop gives the same result. The little light on the drive illuminates initially, then goes out. I uninstalled all USB drivers and let them reinstall 'just in case', but no change.

Are these things repairable?

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News
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Just in case it is the enclosure and not the drive, take the drive out and connect it internally to your desktop. That is, connect it as you would any other disc drive into a desktop. You can leave it hanging free - you don't have to fix it into the chassis.

If it starts up O.K. then you know the enclosure is at fault. You may even just have a bad connection and re-seating it within the enclosure may fix it. However if it still doesn't run then it is borked, and AFAIK drives are not repairable after physical damage.

Cheers

Dave R

Reply to
David

Check out this video. If you have the problem described, it's not repairable, but you might be able to get it going well enough to recover most of the data.

formatting link

It's a long shot, but it sounds like you have nothing to lose.

Cheers,

Colin.

Reply to
Colin Stamp

+1

NT

Reply to
meow2222

Power loss and failure to park heads, followed by a standard case of head stiction - heads stick to the platter if left in that state for a long time. It even happens with disks which park the heads on the platter anyway.

His method of trying to shock the heads loose is wrong. If he had done it by rotating the drive about the disk axis in one hand (arm aligned with disk axis) and stopping it by thumping it against other hand (something soft), the interia of the platters would break the stiction, and without exceeding the max g-force on the drive. Bashing it on the bench relies on the much smaller interia on the heads, exceeds the drive's max g-force, and will liberate trapped dirt inside the drive, besides being less likely to work.

I've done it for demo purposes - i.e. not on a drive where I want the data. You often get loads of bad sectors after doing so, and this is much more likely on a modern higher density drive.

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Not really, its probably internally damaged. Some are pretty resilient, but a drop to a hard floor usually buggers them. You ought to be able to get another drive for it, which may be cheaper than the whole thing, kind of depends whos drive they use inside and if its a standard interface. I'd doubt if the usb to drive part is broken myself, its going to be the mechanical part. Was it very old? Hopefully no important data on it tht was not backed up some place. brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

I see. I'm surprised they can't park in the case of a power loss. I'd have thought that would have been fairly easy to achieve.

I'd agree there. Seeing how hard that one was was stuck though, I don't think even the platter inertia would have been enough to free it up, particularly if you're not allowing yourself to stop it against something hard. It looked as though it was jammed really well.

Indeed. There would have been bad sectors even from the original sticking, let-alone after graunching it free again. As a usable drive it was already toast, but he claimed the bulk of the files could be recovered after unsticking. That's a much better outcome than just writing off all the data along with the drive.

Cheers,

Colin.

Reply to
Colin Stamp

In message , Brian Gaff writes

Actually, IME it's a cheap if not cheaper to buy a complete new unit than buy a bare drive.

I've had more than one USB HDD enclosure fail where it was something to do with the enclosure's electronics rather than the drive itself.

But as has been said, only way to tell is to take out the drive and try it in a desktop, or connected with a usb to sata drive cable (a few quid on ebay/amazon)

Reply to
Chris French

Some can - they use the drive motor as a generator with the inertia of the spinning platters to power the head retraction (and there were even drives which attempted to flush the write cache to disk using this stored energy, but I think that was only drives which park the heads on the platter).

Back in the days of 8" and 14" disk drives, a large capacitor was used to perform emergency head retract on power loss. As the drives aged and the capacitance dropped, that didn't always work.

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

In message , Brian Gaff writes

Thanks for all the replies, as ever. No progress on the drive today, as I have been gathering backups and consolidating stuff. The damaged drive stored only data, mainly jpegs and pdfs, but no programs or e-mails. I seem to be about a month behind, but have not added anything significant in that time, such as personal photos.

Back to the drive itself. It is a Toshiba HDTB120EK3CA 2TB USB 3.0 2.5 Inch Hard Drive, which I used mainly with a Tosh Netbook. It worked perfectly until I dropped it onto a hard wooden table yesterday. The drive spins (I can feel the vibration) but the PC cannot 'see' it. This possibly suggests a connection problem rather than physical damage to the drive itself. I will investigate further, and report back. Seems like the best way forward is to try and extract it from the case, and directly connect to a PC.

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News

That would be on drives still using head stepper motor drive technology, the later 3 1/2 inch IDE drives using servo control of the heads initially relied on a spring to swing the head assembly over to the parking zone where they would become latched by a solenoid operated latching mechanism (the solenoid only operating to release the heads from the parked position - not required under loss of power to latch the heads when the restoring spring dragged them back into the landing zone near the hub).

Later, eco-friendly, drives moved the parking zone to the outer edge of the platter assembly where they would be lifted clear of the disk just after going beyond the track zero location. This didn't happen until the use of the energy stored in the spindle motor replaced the simple bias spring.

The change arose in part because it could lift the heads out of contact with the media and also allowed much faster seek and settling times onto track zero when the heads were unparked or 'loaded' back onto the platter after being unloaded.

This feature could be used as part of an energy saving strategy (a mere half watt or so) by allowing the servo controller to completely power down. Unfortunately, this feature gained notoriety in the Western Digital HDDs by having an automated head parking timeout power saving feature enabled by default to a mere 8 seconds (seemingly) in a misguided effort to display better energy economy to the reviewers no matter the cost in the drive's usable life under normal use.

WD originally specified the maximum head unload/load cycles as

300,000, swiftly changing this life rating figure to 600,000 as the customers started screaming abuse at such bloody minded stupidity by WD.

Staggeringly, 3 or 4 years later they were still defaulting their 4TB RED drives to the same brief head unloading timeout of 8 seconds. The only saving grace in this sorry state of affairs was that, unlike Seagate's even more monumental stupidity with their "specials" modified for use in their style over function overheating FreeAgent drive enclosures, WD did actually issue a tool called WDIDLE3.EXE to reprogram this timeout to a max of 300 seconds (in some cases, even disable it completely - but the disable option didn't always succeed with every such drive model).

It seems to have been a well kept secret but the Samsung Spinpoint drives (the 2TB models at least) also had this head unloading feature built in.

The difference was that it was either set for a much longer timeout by default, or possibly simply disabled by default. I only discovered this by accident some considerable time after experimenting with the the disk power management features in NAS4Free (aka, FreeNAS) when I noticed the head unload cycles on just one of the two SpinPoints had gone north of the one million mark!

The other one had only reached a mere 170,000 or so by that time before I totally disabled the feature on both drives. Sadly, for the million cycles drive, the damage was already done, showing in the form of a rising MZER count. When I replaced it a month or so later and was able to investigate its performance as a storage device, it swiftly showed write errors, disqualifying it as an archive storage drive, the fate normally allocated to all such retired drives pulled from the NAS server box on each disk storage capacity upgrade cycle.

Getting back to that external USB drive, there's a strong possibility that you won't be able to access the SATA interface due to the USB interface being integrated into the drive's controller board as my son found out when trying to source a cheap laptop drive replacement a year or two back. Luckily, he'd been able to open it up to reveal this sad truth without causing any damage so was able to return it to PC World for a full refund.

If this is the case, your options for running diagnostics/repair software might well be on a par with doing an engine decoke through the tailpipe.

Reply to
Johny B Good

Depending on the make and its vintage, the drive itself may only have a USB port with no SATA connector in sight. USB2 doesn't support the full ATA command set (I don't know about USB3 in this regard) so if he's limited to using only USB, he may not be able to run any diagnostics software to investigate any further (unless the manufacturer has made s special USB disk interface version of their diagnostics software).

Reply to
Johny B Good

In message , Johny B Good writes

I conclusion I agree with :-)

Having spent yesterday fannying around with stuff, I find I am OK up to

14/15 September, and have probably lost any data created or received since then, except e-mails which are stored elsewhere. Bloody annoying, but I can live with that. The problem is not so much what is lost, but trying to remember what is lost i.e. what have I created or received since 15th Sept? Stuff that I can remember, I can do something about. It is the unknown unknowns again.
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News

"Johny B Good" wrote

A gynecologist should be able to help with that one :)

Reply to
Gazz

They tend to use the inlet manifold rather than the tail pipe :)

Andrew

Reply to
Andrew Mawson

Before you get into too much of a flap about this, the obvious first step is to open up the enclosure and have a look. There's a perfectly good chance that a connection has come loose. Something you can fix in a couple of minutes. The USB interface is a separate small PCB that plugs into the drive. You can just give it a push to make sure it is well seated and then retest the drive.

Most of these usb drive cases are easy to open, but you can find videos on google.

Reply to
GB

It's not that much of a coincidence that you should mention a gynecologist. I have to admit that my inspiration was a joke about a surgeon who specialised in keyhole surgery who had taken a "Machine Shop" nightschool class to help with his hobby interest in rebuilding classic cars where he was awarded extra points for managing to successfully rebuild an engine via the tailpipe. :-)

Reply to
Johny B Good

It will be interesting to see what Graeme finds when he opens the enclosure.

There's a strong chance that the drive itself may only sport a USB3 port in place of SATA connectors. I tried googling for a technical review of this drive where the reviewer dismantles the drive from the enclosure but to no avail.

If you're going to use a SATA docking station to attach the drive to a PC for further diagnostic analysis, your best chance of success is to use an e-SATA connected dock. USB is likely to prove an insurmountable barrier to most HDD diagnostic software.

Reply to
Johny B Good

That's a valid point when the drive itself is SATA with a seperate SATA to USB bridge board fitted into the enclosure. We'll just have to wait for Graeme's report on what he finds when he manages to open the enclosure.

Reply to
Johny B Good

Rodney & clue just dont mix

NT

Reply to
meow2222

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