External / USB / Portable Hard Drive Repair and Recovery

Need To Recover Data From An External USB Portable Hard Disk ?

External (USB) or portable hard drives consist of a case containing a standard hard disk with a USB interface adaptor. Thus, these units are prone to all the usual problems relating to hard drives plus some others that the external case and interface may bring. External portable hard drives are often dropped or knocked over, this invariably causes a mechanical fault of some kind and results in the hard drive making a ticking noise when it is next powered on. Recovering the data from external hard drives with faults like this is possible once the exact fault has been determined and the hard drive has been correctly repaired.

Example Manufacturers:

• LaCie (eg. Big Disk, Bigger Disk, Bigger Disk Extreme, Quadra etc)
• Iomega
• Freecom
• Maxtor (eg. OneTouch)
• Western Digital (eg. MyPassport, MyBook, Slim and Ultra)
• Toshiba (eg. Canvio and STOR.E)
• Seagate (eg. Expansion, FreeAgent and Backup Plus)
• All types of ”Rugged” external hard drive

Data Clinic are able to repair and recover data from any type of external portable USB hard drive.

External Hard Disk Drive Problems: Two of the most common additional problems we have noticed with portable hard drives are:

• Impact Damage: The drives get knocked over, dropped, banged etc. In almost all cases, the resulting impact they suffer will cause problems.
• Overheating: The drives have a tendency to overheat. This is due to inadequate ventilation on the external case. Some external hard drives don”t contain any ventilation at all, a small number of devices may contain a fan inside the actual case to combat temperature build up.

Symptoms:

• If the hard drive has been dropped:
  The drive will probably make a ticking / musical noise when powered on. This is usually indicative of damage to the read / write heads &/or the motor. Recovery of data is often possible
• If Knocked:
  The drive will make a buzzing noise – usually indicative of a seized spindle. Data is nearly always recoverable.
• If the drive is Overheating:
  The drive will suddenly die and not be recognised by the BIOS, or the computer will appear to start running slowly and noises from the external hard disk may be heard.

External Hard Drive Recovery Possibilities:

Data Clinic staff working in the clean room work on recovering the data from a severely damaged external hard drive using a spin stand.

Entirely dependent on the nature of the problem. Heat associated problems are often easier to tackle than impact damage problems.

Do Not:
Under no circumstances should you continue to use the portable external drive as you may cause further damage to the unit. Also, you should not allow the system to run a repair utility on the drive (such as Scandisk / Chkdsk / Norton etc) – this can often render recoverable data unrecoverable.

What if I have one of these drives but the symptoms are different?:
This is quite possible. These drives are still prone to all the other problems hard disks suffer from ie. mechnical failure, logical failure, bad sectors etc. See our common types of hard disk failures page.

What should I do?:
Call the Data Clinic and talk your problem through with us on 0800 151 2207, or fill out our Contact Form and we”ll call you back