My 1.5 tb Seagate external drive decided to fritz on me today. I’m freaking out. I’m talking thousands of pictures, all of my schoolwork, archived emails, music, you name it. I’m guessing that I’m going to need professional data recovery services, which I’ve never done before. I don’t even want to think about what that’s going to cost, but it’s not really optional. Any ideas? Let me know in the comments. Thanks!
Update: tried another drive in a USB enclosure. It didn’t work either. Turns out that it’s a Maxtor, owned by Seagate. Oh, and they don’t feel like they need to put drivers up on their site. So, day one, no Windows 7; not by any fault of the program. I’m heading for bed or I won’t sleep tonight.
Charleen's Chateau 
Oh my! Are these woes behind you?
The 1st step is to STOP trying to use the hard drive! It can make data recovery more difficult.
2nd. try and find alternate sources for all of your data. Hopefully, you will find some backups you forgot about and it will help relieve the stress.
For the rest one of Matt’s buddies likely can help you out. There are at least 3 areas the problem could be:
1. A corrupt file system. If the drive isn’t making any new sounds, and you are lucky this will be the problem, and a system tool should be able to fix the problem.
2. Consumer hard drivers controls sometimes go. A controller can be taken from the same type of drive, and surprisingly often is a good temporary resolution.
3. Physically crashed hard drive. Seldom the problem, but any mechanical system has wear, and computer parts run hot. It’s unfortunately frequent that hard drives fail before their spec’d life span. Thankfully, in most case they fail slowly enough that you can get all or most of your content off.
I hope this very upsetting situation is soon behind you!
Is the drive the problem or the drivers?
The drive might respond with SpinRite (its worth the $) to resurrect it and to copy off stuff. (do you hear the drive spin up?)
If the drivers are the issue, can you hook it to someone else’s computer and offload?
In any event Carbonite.com might be worth the investment for archiving all this. Unlimited space for flat rate.
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