Western Digital External Hard Drive Failure

[Servilonus]

I've seen people get a good amount of responses on this forum when looking up problems before, and this seems to be the most applicable sub-forum, please correct me if I am wrong.

So I've got a USB-only 250gig Western Digital Mybook from a few years ago. It's always been a bit slow, but now it's gone a little bit beyond that.

While listening to some song in itunes, the drive just ejected itself. When I restarted it, it took a while to show back up, and froze when trying to play any file off of it, either in itunes or just in preview. The hard drive itself makes some troubling sounding noises, I don't know how to better describe them than that.

I don't think it's the USB cable itself or the power supply that's the problem (because the drive stays on), but I've yet to test either.

The problem with the drive is that it starts up, and shortly after STOPS sending information. At first I might be able to open up a few folders, but then it just halts and scans. The drive appears to stay mounted, but no information can be accessed on it. Even when it starts, it cannot transfer a file without immediately halting.

For reference, it's like 250gigs of music, and FAT32 formatted.

I attempted already to transfer the files to another drive, but it freezes, repairing the disk in disk utility, which didn't do anything, and tried to clone the drive with Data Rescue, but when it starts scanning it, the disk becomes inaccessible and it just sort of sits in limbo registering it.

I'm alright with scrapping the drive itself, I have many others and this is my oldest, but I really need what's on it OFF IT first. If anyone has any ideas I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[bpasker]

Indeed the HDD is going bad. I would try and copy smaller chunks of information. Sometimes it is just a bad section of the drive that will not allow you to get your data. Boot Up and get the most important stuff first.

 

[wPod]

Indeed the HDD is going bad. I would try and copy smaller chunks of information. Sometimes it is just a bad section of the drive that will not allow you to get your data. Boot Up and get the most important stuff first.

<---- yeah that. just open it in finder to get stuff off, don't try to access it through iTunes or anything else. but pretty soon your drive will be completely inaccessible.

when you get a new replacement drive, consider getting 2 and using time machine to backup. that way, if one goes bad, you can just toss it and replace it. it is rather unfortunate that hard drives now have the standard of being so 'disposable'

 

[durija]

Sounds like you might not be able to get the data off by yourself. How important is the data? If it is really important, it may be worth visiting a pro in data recovery. You can probably get an idea of the cost with a couple of phone calls.