I've been cleaning out ten years of accumulation from our home recently and my latest project has been to gather up all the computer, electronics, cables, and wires that no one is using anymore, figure out what we want to save, and how to properly dispose of the rest. I knew that there were two unused hard drives lying around our place, a failed drive I had replaced in an old computer I had not yet discarded, and one of unknown provenance that had innocently found its way to an inconspicuous place on a bookshelf.
A bit of research, probing distant memories of days past, and sharp questioning of my wife led to the conclusion that this wayward hard drive was from my wife's old Compaq computer that had long ago been discarded. Further sharp questioning of my wife led to her reaching into drawers and behind monitors and other pieces of electronic paraphernalia to produce no less than four (FOUR!) other hard drives, all of the "portable" USB type, and all not working for one reason or another. Being the kind soul that I am, I embarked on the journey of recovering all the memories (photos and movies of family and vacations lost, especially those of our daughter) that were locked in the magnetic orbital spheres of these five hard drives.
The very first problem I encountered was on that original Compaq hard drive. It had an IDE connection, whereas all the computers we own use SATA connectors and have no IDE ports. So my wife bought this neat little adapter that can convert all three major hard drive connectors, IDE, regular SATA (used in desktop hard drives) and micro SATA (used in laptop hard drives), into a USB connector. This proved really useful down the road, not just for this first drive. She also bought two new portable USB drives to store what I recovered.
With my old desktop set up and the adapter in hand, it was trivial to copy the contents of the Compaq hard drive (which was technically manufactured by Seagate) onto a new portable USB hard drive. My next task would be slightly more challenging.
My wife had a huge, old USB IOmega hard drive that had stopped working. Preliminary testing confirmed that when the drive was plugged in, it did not even attempt to spin. (Hard drives need to spin to read/write data, and this can usually be detected by gently placing your hand on the drive, if it's accessible like an external hard drive. You should be able to feel a slight vibration when the drive is turned on, or hear a slight, or not so slight, hum or whir.) This was further complicated by the fact that Iomega had been bought around the time the drive had been purchased, and the entire Iomega product line discontinued. There wasn't much support or documentation available. Fortunately, I did find information on opening the case and a suggestion that the problem was likely to be an adapter that wasn't particularly necessary.
This turned out to be laughably simple. I undid the screws on the back of the unit, and the hard drive just kind of fell out when I tipped the unit upright. Inside was a beautiful Seagate Barracuda 1 TB desktop hard drive. I pulled off the adapter that converted the micro SATA port into a USB port, plugged it into the adapter my wife had bought, and the drive worked perfectly. This was the nicest drive of the five my wife had, in good enough shape to keep and continue using. It's a shame it was fouled by a cheap adapter. My wife had a ton of data on this drive, so copying the files onto one of the new external drives took more than seven hours, but all in all, this was a fairly painless recovery.
The next drive was probably the most difficult. It was another Iomega drive, but more modern and much smaller (and a bit beat-up). Plugging it in, it spun up and the light went on, but it would not show up in file manager. Some online searching encouraged me to use window's disk management to try to analyze the problem. There the drive showed up, but drive manager would not allow me to interact with it in any way. There were obvious things to try, like assigning it a letter, but all options were grayed out. Additional searching led me to turn to dos's disk partition tool. There, I could see the problem. The disk had a partition, but no volume.
This was interesting information, but unfortunately not terribly useful. It seemed likely that had I wanted to use the disk, I could probably format it and create a new volume and partition. (I personally would recommend against trying to use a disk once it has failed in any way). But what I really wanted was to recover the data on the disk, and doing any of those things would jeopardize that data. In the unlikely case that this was another instance of a bad connector, I opened the box up, took out the hard drive inside, removed the adapter and plugged it in directly, but there was no change.
I cast about for a long time, frustrated that I could see the disk but just couldn't get to its contents. I felt pretty sure that there's a way to get data off a disk that has lost its volume, and that twenty years ago I could have found information on how to do that. But modern search engines seem to have lost the ability to find highly specialized hyper-technical web sites. I kept getting the same sites suggesting the same very common, but in this case utterly useless, suggestions (like format the hard drive). In the end, I downloaded the free version of the EaseUS data recovery tool. This tool also had trouble with the volume-less disk, but I hit the "Can't find location" link in the tool and it was able to see that the drive was there and do a general scan of the disk. I didn't want to pay for the tool yet, but I knew it could recover some information, so I moved on.
The fourth disk was kind of the weirdest. It's an old SimpleTech external hard drive with a USB cable with two connectors on it. Plugging one connector in caused the disk to spin up and the lights to come on, but then the disk seemed to shut down. The internets suggested trying the USB plugs in a variety of ports. Fooling around in this manner, I was able to get the drive to spin up and stay spinning using the other connector. This drive was partitioned into three parts, but one of the partitions had been lost. I couldn't see it at first in disk manager, but it was there in disk partition, an extra 4GB of space on the disk that was not associated with a distinct partition.
So I copied the two working partitions onto the new external hard drive and went to work on the missing partition. Again, I was wary of fooling with the partition too much and losing the data, so I ended up using EaseUS on it. It turned out that the missing partition had most of the photos and documents and personalized files on it. So between the third and the fourth hard drives, my wife decided that she was willing to pay for one month of EaseUS. I ran a number of scans on the third disk and on this missing partition, recovered the data that I could onto the new external hard drive, and moved on.
The fifth and final drive was the least interesting. It would spin up for about ten seconds and then fall quiet. I opened the case, took out the disk, and connected it directly with the same results. Because it wasn't spinning, there was nothing to be seen in disk manager or disk partition. My wife said there wasn't much on this disk, I think it had failed so quickly she hadn't really used it much, so I gave up on it.
I hope this post has been instructful for those who have found it and has encouraged you that even though external hard disks may appear to have broken and failed, it is possible to recover data from them. There were definitely a bunch of good tools and tips and tricks we found in this journey that weren't necessarily immediately obvious or easy to find. One can only hope that google and the other search engines direct you here if any of this is useful to you, but I don't hold out high hopes.
In my next post I will talk about disposal of these hard drives.