Dual external Hard drive failure.

[TravisD]

Hoping some of you may have a solution for me.
I have 2 - 1 TB hard drives in an external enclosure connected to the computer via USB. The product is no longer being made and all attempts to contact the manufacturer have been unsuccessful. I unplugged the drive from the computer (To relocate the computer). When I plugged it back in, I let the smoke out of it. As best I can tell, the board located inside the hard drives enclosure has failed. I have taken out the hard drives and tried to plug them directly into my motherboard but neither is recognized as a drive, the drives are not recognized at all. Is there anything I can do to try to salvage the drives? If I can get the data back that would be nice however, if I can just re use the drive that would be fine too.
Thanks for your help.

 

[goombawaho]

So, have you verified on the motherboard (assuming SATA hard drives) that the sata ports that they are connected to have been set to ON or Auto?? Some Dell's have to have each port enabled or disabled.

Do you hear them spin up if you power the PC on and put your ear next to them?

Data recovery is always an option because the drives were in working order and likely it's just the controller board that's fried or the motor. Someone could transplant a new board onto it if it was available. Either way (data recovery or parts transplant), I recommend a professional service vs. some redneck from Craig's List IF you value your data.

Were the hard drives in a RAID 0 or RAID 1. If RAID 0, it gets more expensive for recovery.

 

[TravisD]

Thanks for your suggestions, I built the computer years ago. Its a Gigabyte Motherboard and I have not had to enable the sata ports before. No, The drives do not make any sound at all at start up. So lets say I don't care about the info on the drives, I would like to just get the drives working again. I don't know what Raid it was configured, I can say that when they were working I could view and install whatever I wanted on whichever drive I chose, they were each assigned a different drive letter. Is it possible to get the drives working again with software or because my drives are not spinning up or recognized by the computer, maybe they are dead as well?

 

[rclarke250]

What was the name and model of the original enclosure, some of the small external boxes, don't format the drives as FAT or NTFS, or even EXT3. And if that is the case, you would not expect to plug the drive in to a computer motherboard, and have windows see them, they wouldn't show up as a recognized format. I would download and create UBCD here. And then see if the drive diagnostics on the cd can find the drives, after you boot from the disk with the drives connected to data and power on the PC. If they are and pass the diagnostics, you can do a DBAN nuke, and blow away any partition and format, and start fresh. If the drives, still are not recognized, then you let too much smoke out, and burned out the hdd controller cards, time to buy new drives.

 

[goombawaho]

But if they're not spinning up.......... looks bad. Did we put our ear next to the drives??

 

[rclarke250]

I agree, not good. They sound dead.

 

[TravisD]

Yes, no spinning up. I even held them in my hand. No vibes. No spinning up.

 

[goombawaho]

It's all up to you now what you want to do - send them for recovery, throw them against the wall, try your own repair (though we don't know which part is broken).