Linkstation crash - now can't see the Samusng HDD by USB ?

[browny181]

Any help or advice greatly appreciated. I've had a Buffalo Linkstation NAS Drive (HS-DHGL) for last 18 months. Started crashing a week ago - Would start up then after about 15 mins the data would be unobtainable, the unit would issue error beeps and would have to be left for some time before the process could start again. Having researched problems with this unit on the net, it appears similar issues are very common, and its often the hardware inside the support unit rather than the hard drive that fails. I think the beeps the unit was pushing out referred to a possible fan failure, but I could be wrong.
Buffalo do offer to replace the whole unit in the event of such a failure - but you lose all your data. This drive was a family network backup drive, and contains everything from the last 5-6 years, photos, videos, music etc.
I made the decision to try and remove the internal 320GB HDD, and following a video on YouTube, was successful without any problems. The HDD transpired to be a Samsung HD321KJ SATA HDD. I purchased a SATA HDD USB Docking Station, thinking I'd hopefully be able to simply push the drive into the docking station, plug the USB into my laptop, and I'd hopefully be able to see all my data and drag it off to a new backup drive.
I've done this, the drive certainly powers up and spins, but I can't see it's contents through Windows Explorer.
When plugged in the laptop notices new hardware and tells me its installed and ready to use. In Device Manager, its listed under Disk Drives as a Samsung HD321KJ, as well as the internal HDD in my Vaio, but it isn't listed in any of the available drives in 'My Computer'.
I've no experience with SATA drives, having previously only dealt with IDE ones.
I'm confident but obviously not entirely sure that the data is still there on the drive - but I just can't see it.
Any ideas of how I might be able to get at it without having to send it off in the first instance to expensive data recovery...?
For info the jumpers don't have any connectors on at all and are all free.
Any help or ideas gratefully received... many thanks, Andy

 

[G0AOZ]

Check Disk Management to see if it's there, and this will tell you if it has a recognised partition, e.g. NTFS, etc. Check to see if a drive letter has been allocated - this is maybe all that is needed for Windows Explorer to 'see' the contents. Assuming it's recognised, right clicking on the drive in Disk Management will give you the option to change or add a drive letter.

If all that fails, maybe the partition has been corrupted. In that case, try something like GetDataBack (

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm).

Use the free demo, which allows you to check if data is recoverable. Unfortunately you'll need to actually buy the full application to recover your data, but probably worthwhile. Many posters on Tech-Tips have successfully used this software, including me...

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[rsh123]

I had a similar situation happen to me. I was able to recover the information after imageing the drive and using knoppix. I found some usefull links here.

http://www.drive-rescue.com/Dos&Donts.html