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
    2·
    15 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·
      13 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·
      13 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.