External HD Problem

[richardson.hila]

Hi,
Unfortunately i dropped my external HDD (3.5" 80GB Western Digital) off my bed yesterday and since then it's acted a little strange, and i was just wondering if it was the HDD itself or the enclosure? I'm going with the enclosure. It powers up fine, the light remains green, then after about ten seconds the light flashes to an orange color which usually indicates it's writing something, and it does not mount. Then after about ten minutes it finally mounts onto my MacBook Pro. I've ran disk utility between this time and it tends to just stay on the "Gathering Disk Information" screen for that ten minutes before it mounts, and then the drive works like it's normal again. I've tried the HDD inside my housemates Linux desktop and it boots perfectly first time around, and all data is accessible. I haven't tried it as an external HDD yet on a windows based/linux based machine but i'd say it would probably react in the same way it does on my mac? So i presume it's the enclosure itself having issues? But i just wanted to hear your opinions as well

 

[t0mat0]

I'd make a back up of the data NOW. From experience, it's much better to have 2 working drives, and a backup of your data on the second, than wait a few weeks and have no data, and one non-working drive.

 

[richardson.hila]

The only data that's on there is already on another drive, nicely backed up on my iMac G3 i last used my external HDD to backup all my documents and applications before doing a clean install of leopard...it's just annoying i guess that i have to now wait ten minutes for the thing to mount.

 

[itickings]

If it works like it should in your friend's desktop, it should work just as well with a new external enclosure. Just keep in mind that even if it may seem to work now, the condition can change rapidly.

If it was mine, I would consider it dead already... Make sure you have everything important backed up.

 

[Mechcozmo]

I'd make a back up of the data NOW. From experience, it's much better to have 2 working drives, and a backup of your data on the second, than wait a few weeks and have no data, and one non-working drive.

Agreed. There's no easy way to figure it out, and at the cost of losing the data on the drive, buy another external and copy the data from one to the other.

Hard drives have a nasty habit of failing. Don't put too much weight into the readings you're getting from other computers if the enclosure doesn't seem to appreciate it.