Hey everybody, feel free to post any tech support or general tech discussion questions you have right here.
As always, be excellent to each other.
Yours truly, moderators.
Hey everybody, feel free to post any tech support or general tech discussion questions you have right here.
As always, be excellent to each other.
Yours truly, moderators.
Any suggestions on where to start with troubleshooting an external hard drive that isn’t being detected? For context, it’s a very old 1TB HDD that is in its own case. I’m not really sure how I can open it because the case has no screws. It worked last week and suddenly stopped. Usually the led indicator blinks when I plug it into my laptop’s usb port, but now it just stays the same color (meaning no activity).
In desperation I’d first try (if you haven’t already) all the different usb ports in case it’s a faulty port. Then a different USB cable, assuming it’s not built into the case. If it has some external power supply I’d try a different one if possible.
Beyond that, by “very old” do you mean spinning rust, or are they SSD?
Either way, there’s always a way to get into the case, if it’s a popular enough drive/case, there may be a video on how to do it. Depending on they type of drive there maybe more you can check on the inside.
After you find out how to remove the enclosure you can direct attach the drive to a computer to rescue the data. If that isn’t working you can try to get an exact model of the drive and swap out the logic board. Of that doesn’t work, some of the old school spinning rust drives could get a bit of revivication by freezing them (helped with some mechanical alignment).
Sounds like a dead drive. Is it making clicking or grinding noises? Either way its probably toast unless you want to fork out a bunch of money