Hard Drive crashed -- Is it the drive or the enclosure? More Questions! Help!

[Trashman]

I'm not sure if it's possible to give an answer, but I wanted to see what the possibilities are.

A few weeks ago, I was using a ceramic space heater that was plugged into the same surge protector as my hard drives. Well, the heater drew too much power and tripped breaker on the power strip. After that, one of my three external hard drives stopped working. It doesn't show up on the computer or anything. When I turn it on or plug it into the computer, it does give the "ding dong" recognition bell, either. So, I'm wondering, is it possible that the controller in the enclosure got fried, but the drive is ok? I'm not even sure I'll be able to get the drive out of there, but I'd think that I should be able to.

For the record, it's an Acomdata 250gb Hybrid drive. My 400gb Calvary was fine after the power shut off and so was my oldest drive, a 160gb Seagate (in one of the "Rock" enclosures you see on ebay)

 

[Lynx_Arc]

Re: Hard Drive crashed -- Is it the drive or the enclosure?

Is the power light coming on? could just be a power supply or it may be fused and need the fuse replaced.

 

[Kilovolt]

Re: Hard Drive crashed -- Is it the drive or the enclosure?

FWIW my external hard drive does that occasionally when I unplug it for cleaning the table or things like that. When I plug it in again it simply does nothing. External AC power has apparently nothing to do with this, it's the USB connection to the PC.

After trying many cures I found that the easiest way out is simply to plug it in again and again and of course wait a while each time. After 3 - 6 attempts it just starts again like nothing was wrong before...:thinking:

Just my 2 cents... :shrug:

 

[tiktok 22]

Re: Hard Drive crashed -- Is it the drive or the enclosure?

Go into device manager and remove the drive from your PC. Reboot your PC. Plug in HD and see if it once again recognized. If not, you can remove the drive from the enclosure and plug it into a spare IDE connector(make sure the master-slave setting is correct). It should show up in the BIOS. Then after it boots, right click my computer>manage>disk management and see if it's there. I,m assuming it's IDE, if not connect it with a SATA cable to the motherboard and see if it is recognized. If your willing to buy a IDE/SATA to USB connector, this would bypass the enclosure electronics.

 

[Trashman]

Re: Hard Drive crashed -- Is it the drive or the enclosure?

The power light does come on. I meant to say, earlier, that it DID NOT give the "ding dong" bell, but I was sort of wrong, it actually gives a ding dong bell every now and then, but the computer doesn't recognize it. It doesn't show up on my PC (old laptop), so there's no need to remove it. I went into the disk manager to see if anything's there, and nope, nothin'. I'll probably, eventually, try to remove it from the enclosure and pick up one of those ide/sata to usb connectors or, better yet, I'll just pick up a whole new enclosure, whenever they go on sale at Fry's.

 

[tiktok 22]

Re: Hard Drive crashed -- Is it the drive or the enclosure?

Pop open your PC and plug the HD into a spare IDE port. Just make sure to select Master or slave(or CS if thats what your PC is using. Then you will know if it's worth picking up a new enclosure for it.

 

[Trashman]

Re: Hard Drive crashed -- Is it the drive or the enclosure?

Pop open your PC and plug the HD into a spare IDE port. Just make sure to select Master or slave(or CS if thats what your PC is using. Then you will know if it's worth picking up a new enclosure for it.

I'm using a laptop.

 

[tiktok 22]

Re: Hard Drive crashed -- Is it the drive or the enclosure?

Oh!!!

 

[Trashman]

Re: Hard Drive crashed -- Is it the drive or the enclosure?

I bought a new enclosure, today, and, well.....not quite working. I think the HD is good, but it seems that the drive won't be usable in the new enclosure, until I format the sucker. In Disk Management, it shows up as a healthy active drive, but there is no number assigned to it, and the "assign drive letter" option is unavailable. It basically wants me to format the drive before it'll assign a drive letter. I'm wondering, could this be because of the enclosure it's in? I bought a bargain-basement type eclosure from Fry's for only $16.99 and, in the instructions, it says to set the HD to "Master" and to then FDISK and Format the drive. It's like I have to format any drive I'm putting in this enclosure. Is this normal? Is there something else I can do? Are there jumpers on the HD that I can flip, so that this drive will not need to be formatted after being put into this new enclosure? Would a different enclosure work? I'm wondering if, since this drive came out of an Acomdata external drive (which, BTW, after opening it up, I see that it's actually a Western Digital Caviar drive in an Acomdata enclosure.), that if I put it into another Acomdata enclosure, I'd be able to access the data on it.

So, any knowledge on this, anybody?

 

[light_emitting_dude]

Re: Hard Drive crashed -- Is it the drive or the enclosure?

In disk managment when you right click on the disk does it give you the properties option? If it does, select tool tab and under error checking select check now (check auto fix file system errors and the other box can't remember the exact terms) and then reboot. This should run windows chkdsk at startup on the disk. Sounds like your file system got corrupted when the power was cut.

If the drive was not connected externally you could run several chkdsk options. chkdsk can repair corrupted file systems. If the above does not work just google chkdsk.

 

[Trashman]

Re: Hard Drive crashed -- Is it the drive or the enclosure?

Nope, when I right click on the disk, only the "delete partition" option is available. I'll look into chkdsk.