recovering data from a hard drive

[mtbazz]

I have a mac mini and was using a lacie 500 gig mini hub hard drive for storage of my itunes library (close to 1000 cds and shows were on there) along with irreplaceable photos, videos, and more.

Sometime between last night and this morning something happened to the drive to cause it to not be recognized by any of my computers (MBP and imac), it does not even show up in disk utilities.

Does anyone know what my chances are of getting the data that is on that drive back? It was a multiyear project to load all those cd's on there and organize them, not to mention the irreplaceable files that were on there of previous bands, some photos, videos etc.

Also, I am fairly certain that there is nothing incrminating on this drive. That said I have taken photos of my plants from time to time (never documenting a whole grow), and some of those may be on there, maybe a half dozen out of thousands of photos.

Also, I am fairly certain that this is a mechanical failure as the drive powers up and I can hear a faint clicking sound from inside.

 

[soulfly22583]

If this were my set up I would remove the physical drive and hook it up to another machine to see if the interface card had maybe been burnt up.

 

[mtbazz]

If this were my set up I would remove the physical drive and hook it up to another machine to see if the interface card had maybe been burnt up.

You mean remove the actual drive mechanism from the enclosure?
Im really pretty illiterate when it comes to the technical side of computers. Im sure I can remove the drive, but how do I hook it up?

 

[the_lonely_one]

How long was the drive making noise? When a hard disk is making a clicking noise it is usually a sign of mechanical failure. The arm is going back and forth over the platters but can't read anything. Sounds like you will need a professional to get that data back. Time to do some calculations to see if the price of recovery is worth it. Sorry to hear about the failure.

In the future you should look into setting up a cheap RAID (5, mirrored, etc...) array with redundancy . That way if a drive fails you will have the data backed up and you can just replace the dead drive.

 

[Hammerhead]

I just replaced a usb 1TB that just stopped working. If it wont spin up its broke. I have a SCSI to usb adaptor that I can put on my drives to trouble shoot them. You can send in the drive to recover your data but its very expensive.