Problems With Portable Drives

Here are some enquiries we’ve had come in this week about problems with portable (or ‘USB’) external hard drives. As always, refer to our main external hard drive recovery page for general recovery information on all types of external, portable and USB hard drive problem.

Western Digital’s…

My western digital my passport repeatedly stopped during transfers. I then removed and re-connected the drive a number of times in order to try the transfer again, however it is now at a point where it my computer does recognise that a hard drive has been connected, but I cannot access the partitions.

As you tell us your computer can still recognise the My Passport, there’s a good chance that we can rule out anything being wrong with the USB data transfer cable or the external casing of the hard drive. Much more likely is the the drive either having a data corruption, a weak head, bad media or a firmware problem. Correcting the problem should allow access to the partitions once again. Refer to our Western Digital recovery page for more information about restoring the data from WD drives.

Western Digital My Book World II will boot up and I cannot access my data.
I have 2 x 3tb Mirrored drives. I have tried to read them using a Linux reader with no joy, Need a quote to copy off the data please.

Can you describe in more detail what the matter with the drives is? Is the computer still seeing the drives when you connect them? Are there any unusual noises coming from them? Are they getting overly hot? You can read more about types of hard drive problem here. In the meantime, try another non-Linux reader and look at each drive individually, as the drives are mirrored the data on them should be identical.

Seagate’s…

I have a seagate backup plus hard drive, which i accidently dropped while backing up to my computer. The hard drive is now not visible in win explorer.
This is a 1TB drive. Could you let me know how much you would charge and the time scale for recovery of the hard drive.

I’ll make an assumption that because you dropped the hard drive, it’s now making a ticking or beeping noise now when powered on? This is what usually happens when hard drives are dropped, internal components are damaged and the drive will no longer appear visible in Windows Explorer. If this is the case, the drive has a mechanical fault and before we can retrieve the data we are going to need to repair the hard drive. This will involve replacing the damaged parts with good ones from a donor drive. Fortunately we carry a large number of hard drive spare parts.

Seagate Barracuda 2gb died this am (Monday)
Can I drop it off to New London House in person?

You sure can – give our London New London House office a call on 0207 111 0964 and book yourself an appointment. It’ll take 10 or so minutes for us to assess the drive, we’ll then let you know what’s wrong with it, what we need to do to get the data off and how much it’s going to cost. It’s then up to you if you want to proceed.

Hard Drive Dead ?

If you’ve got a dead hard drive you’ve come to the right place. Call us on 0800 151 2207 or fill out the form to your right and we’ll contact you. We recover data from all sorts of hard drives with all sorts of problems.