[VirgoRival]

Rocstor 2.5 HDD enclosure:

clicking, not working, Circuit board corrosion

One of my girlfriend's external drives is no longer working

with seemingly no hope of fixing it, She cracked it open to and found the circuit board is a bit of a mess

looking it, it looks like Just another ol 2.5" HDD by Toshiba that is attached to the board by a connect that looks like will come right off
(this all is new to me)

I'm assuming the clicking is coming from the fact that it isn't getting proper power because its USB powered, no external power source is needed with this Enclosure

If the HDD hasn't failed.
Can I just unplug the Circuit Board, plug it into my tower to retrieve the data from it.

 

[Silvos00]

Yes you should be able to if it has sata connectors.

 

[latelesley]

Most external drives are just standard drives with an adapter board in an enclosure. You take the drive out, and it should fit into a standard PC or laptop. I think there are a few cases where the drive is proprietary, but this is rare.

 

[VirgoRival]

well putting it in

it seems the drive is dead or not working because it won't open

 

[latelesley]

Sounds like the click you've heard is the click of death. Sorry for your loss.

 

[VirgoRival]

So far we found a data recovery program

Piriform Recuva that was able to pull 470 files (33.5G's) from the drive that is now sitting on My external for transfer o 3 o

so it had some success
But what she wanted was the music out of it and to see if we can save the drive
most of that data was just stuff that she didn't really need, but its nice to have back

but it only shows only a small number of music files, not nearly the libary she said was on there

So I'm doing a Deep scan of it down to see what else it can see

So yes, just plugging into a got it to work, but if it doesn't work, you can use a Data Recovery to possible get data from it
But our issue wasn't clean plug and play but some is better then none o 3 o

Thanks guys

 

[Silvos00]

I don't know how widely used it is, but a trick we use as a last ditch effort before you toss the drive is to put it in the freezer. Mind you, next time you use it will likely be the last time it spins up after that. So use it wisely.

 

[latelesley]

Try TestDisk, I've had better success with recovery of files with that.

 

[larymoencurly]

Quote:

Originally Posted by latelesley

Most external drives are just standard drives with an adapter board in an enclosure. You take the drive out, and it should fit into a standard PC or laptop. I think there are a few cases where the drive is proprietary, but this is rare.

All 3.5" external drives still contain standard internal drives, but about every WD and Seagate 2.5" external made in the past 3-4 years uses an internal USB drive that doesn't need a separate USB-to-SATA bridge card. Fortunately Toshibas are an exception (the only exception?).

USB-only internal drive on left, SATA internal drive on right:



Actually those USB-only internals probably aren't 100% USB-only because they have both a SATA chip and a SATA-USB bridge chip on their circuit boards, and some people have bypassed the latter:

 

[latelesley]

I was sure I read somewhere where they had "native" USB drives - IE the USB was built onto the controller board. I wasn't sure if it still used a USB -SATA bridge chip, but it seems so. It just looks like they're leaving out the SATA connector, and replacing it with the USB/bridge chip. Interesting info though.