You are about to learn one of the hardest lessons in computers. Portable drives are SHIT for backups. Everything "important" is kept on two different tape drives each stored at a different place. I keep one in a safety storage bin at the bank, the 2nd at a friends house.

a 11 y/o drive failing is NOT odd. Double so for a portable one. The key here, is the portable part. They ALWAYS get bumped, dropped, kicked, etc while running and it always causes them to fail fast. That old drive in that Packard Hell, probably has as much actual run-time as that portable drive you have. Not to mention it probably sat on a deck and never fell off.

It could be the external enclosure itself that is dying and not really the drive.

Any time an external drive starts giving me trouble, I take it out of the enclosure and either hook it up via some sort of dock or just hook it up directly to the controller on the motherboard.

I've seen quite a few drives that worked fine once they were taken out of the enclosure.

Sometimes the enclosure controller itself goes bad and sometimes it is the power supply.

It is at least worth a try to see if it will allow you to get your data off.

If that doesn't work, you can always try a used controller board off of the same exact model hard drive. The boards are generally available on eBay.

Barring that, the only thing to do is to send it into a recovery company and spend big bucks to try to get your data back.

cyclone3d wrote:

It could be the external enclosure itself that is dying and not really the drive. […]
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It could be the external enclosure itself that is dying and not really the drive.

Any time an external drive starts giving me trouble, I take it out of the enclosure and either hook it up via some sort of dock or just hook it up directly to the controller on the motherboard.

I've seen quite a few drives that worked fine once they were taken out of the enclosure.

Sometimes the enclosure controller itself goes bad and sometimes it is the power supply.

It is at least worth a try to see if it will allow you to get your data off.

If that doesn't work, you can always try a used controller board off of the same exact model hard drive. The boards are generally available on eBay.

Barring that, the only thing to do is to send it into a recovery company and spend big bucks to try to get your data back.

I hooked up the HDD to my motherboard and it's the same sob story. I diagnosed the logic board, and surprisingly, it's in good shape. Should I just purchase a logic board on eBay for the drive? I also have software on my desktop to recover the files off of a hard drive. I had a hard drive crap out on me before, and after running MiniTool Partition manager's HDD checker, I got all of my data off, and the HDD had over 1 million bad sectors, but the SMART test was still good surprisingly.

As amazing as it sounds I have never once had a hard drive die on me. Data loss? YES, outright death? No.

Just keep trying stuff. Imagine the drive is one idea. Using GParted to recover lost data is another.

Sometimes hard drives just break so fast you can't get the data off of them. If you want good backup media for older PCs, QIC-80s are cheap and easy.

On some HDDs there are some pins on the back that are there for a serial connection. I heared that you can retrieve your data from there though it's going to take ages since the fastest it can go is probably 115200 bits per seconds

PhotoRec on the Hirens Boot CD does pretty good at recovering files. A simpler, but less effective one is Recuva from Piriform.

luckybob speaks words of wisdom...agree 100% with everything in his post.

If you're desperate to recover data and not having luck, you can try SpinRite. It's $90, but there is a money back guarantee if it doesn't work for you. There's another one called HDD Regenerator that I've heard some people have success with, but I've never tried it myself.

edit: some links that may help:
https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questi … ailed-hard-disk
https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questi … ion-of-spinrite

bjwil1991 wrote:

SMART test was still good surprisingly.

show SMART from MHDD or Victoria.

If there is some actual serious stuff you need off that drive, and it's worth money to you, you can always bring it to a data recovery service. Tampering with the drive further can often lead to less of a chance they can do anything.

I've got a 1TB WD external drive that started doing similar things, can write fine but certain folders couldn't be read, and was affecting more and more as days passed.
So plugged the HDD direct to the motherboard and copied everything across fairly quickly.
I tried a 2T and a 500 B drive connected to the SATA to USB converter and both did funny things, cant remember what now but enough not to trust the adaptor anymore and gave up.

It all comes down to the drive cant be trusted at the moment, its lying to you one way or another! ignore smart test, chkdisk or whatever. get the files or an image off the drive onto something known to be good however you can.
anything that changes on the drive has a 50/50 chance of corrupting things more.

Sound like this drive has a serious mechanical disease, and is starting to corrupt the Service Area Cylinder software modules (in modern HDDs the logic board microcontroller software isn't stored in an eeprom, but in a special track inside the HDD so them can be updatable when microcontroller needs it).

So, the more you try to tamper with the drive, the more corrupt the SA and subsequent cylinders will become, and the less chances you can get anything from it. Just send the damn thing to Recovery Services. Hardware problems can't get solved with software tools.

Does the freezer trick work on modern drives? I got data off a 20 year old drive this way. It took about a week of daily freezing and data reading, but I eventually managed to recover nearly all the files on it.