My external Maxtor drive won’t be detected on my linux machine. I have the power cord all tight and I have firewire that I think that came with the Maxtor drive itself. It just won’t be recognized. Any help.

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    20 hours ago

    Can you hear or feel the drive spinning with the power and USB plugged in?

    Do you have a second computer (Linux or windows) to also try it in?

    A brief search seems to indicate this drive is a minimum of 15 years old, which is an incredible age for a portable mechanical drive. I would honestly be preparing yourself to be dealing with this drove finally being cooked beyond repair. Sure hope you kept backups of what was on it!

    • stucljr@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      18 hours ago

      There are two of them and I don’t think my brother kept back ups, that is why he ask me to figure it out. I am the tech one to go to lol.

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        16 hours ago

        So, my first goto with an unresponsive external would be to remove the drive from its enclosure. Typically these are retail internal hard drive that are put in an enclosure with a small circuit board that converts SATA to a USB or firewire and sometimes those die.
        If you “shuck” the drive and connect it directly to a computer internally via SATA you can bypass that board.

        Next step is put the drive in your freezer for an hour or so then pull it out and connect it immediately. Sometimes this frees them up and makes them work for a short while, enough to copy some of the data off.

        Drives not being recognized also sometimes happens if they corrupt one sector that’s part of the file system tables and not the actual file system. The drive may be there but not have a file system for windows to read So there’s some other tricks you can try using Linux tools to dump the exact bit for bit contents of the drive, and pass them thru an analyzer that will try to pick out what’s likely of the file structure.

        However, still given the drives age, I’ll almost guarantee it’s experienced a full mechanical failure and there might not be anything to recover…

        • stucljr@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          14 hours ago

          Thank you for the valuable information. I have a sata kit for testing external drives but I need to get out of the case it came with

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          1·
          14 hours ago

          ext step is put the drive in your freezer for an hour or so then pull it

          I’ve read that that doesn’t work on drives these days, though I can’t speak from personal knowledge.

          https://www.pcworld.com/article/419677/that-old-freezer-trick-to-save-a-hard-drive-doesnt-work-anymore.html

          What is the freezer trick?

          At one time, a hard drive might suddenly lock up for any number of reasons, succumbing to the “click of death” or other failures. One of them could be what drive vendors called “stiction,” a fancy name for a drive whose lubrication failed. The drive’s platters essentially “stuck,” and the drive wouldn’t read data. That meant, of course, that any data stored on it was potentially lost forever.

          The “freezer trick” involved sticking the drive in a waterproof plastic bag, and then into the freezer. If you left it alone for a few hours, the cold would cool the metal down enough to constrict it, and, in some cases, free up the disks to spin. The idea behind the freezer trick was to save the data by then quickly copying it to another device before another lockup occurred, Moyer said.

          Stiction, though, is largely a thing of the past. Modern and more complex drives have improved lubrication systems and “off-platter parking” (where the drive stores its head off the surface of the disk, like a phonograph, when not in use), to prevent this problem from occurring, Moyer explained. “As a result, stiction rarely happens with today’s technology,” he said.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      19 hours ago

      If the drive’s mechanism has indeed failed, there are data recovery places that can probably deal with it, as long as the platters aren’t damaged. They’ll put it in a cleanroom, physically open the drive, very carefully take the platters out, stick its platters into a known-good drive of the same version and revision, pull the data off and send it to you.

      I don’t know what the going rate for this is, but last I looked, it was hundreds to thousands.

      kagis

      Sounds like that’s still accurate.

      https://www.handyrecovery.com/how-much-does-data-recovery-cost/

      Mechanical Failure (Expensive)

      • Cost: $500–$3,000

      Whenever your hard drive starts making strange noises, experiences an unfortunate encounter with water, or simply dies without any warning, you have a big problem because mechanical issues can be very expensive to repair, requiring replacement components, advanced techniques and equipment, and controlled cleanroom environment.