External hard drive erroring

[misfitz69]

Ok I pretty much know the answer but I figured I'd see if someone had some good news.


I have a hard drive in an external adapter. Its worked fine for a long time and even worked 2 days ago. Today, I turn it on and it starts to spin up, sounds a little odd. Then it goes vrrrr pause vrr pause vrrr pause vrrr pause then spinning loudly, and the indicator LED goes from blue(on but not accessing) to a solid purple(which usually just blinks purple while accessing).

Am I screwed ? I really need to know because I have 50gig of music, 40gig of vids and several gigs of other important info and pics. I really want to keep the material on the drive. It has everything. I always move stuff over to it, so I dont have to worry about space lost, or the comp crashing altogether and losing it.


Any help would be wonderfull.

 

[SjrH]

Sounds like a sticky (stuck) actuator mech. Probably the most common cause of hard drive failure.

Doesn't mean the data on your drive is lost, but it could cost a fortune to recover via a 3rd party.

I know it sounds silly, but have you tried dropping the drive from a small distance (i.e 2 inches)? This can sometimes 'shock' the drive. Sounds odd, but it works with a lot of laptop hard drives that exhibit the symptoms you describe!

Be careful though, because if you have loose mechanics in your drive and you power it up, then recovery could be pretty much impossible if your drives platters are damaged.