Recovering data from a fried external hard drive

I've got an old Seagate FreeAgent external hard drive, 500 GB. It’s the kind that needs an AC adapter to power it. It has been sitting in storage for about 3 years when I pulled it out to get the data off of it so I could back it up onto a new storage setup I have now.

When I plugged it in there was about a three second pause before I started to smell that “burning electronics” smell and—sure enough—I saw that fatal gray smoke coming out of one of the vents on the bottom of the hard drive. You know, it’s that magic smoke that makes electronics work; once the smoke leaves, it never works again.

So now I’m wondering if there is any chance I can still recover the data from the hard drive?

I’ve poked around enough to know that basically there’s two logical parts to these things, the controller hardware and then the actual storage itself. Is it possible to separate the storage and connect it to another controller or some other type of hardware that can read it? If the storage does not physically look damaged is it likely that the data is still intact?

If it is possible, is it difficult/complicated enough to merit spending $$ for a data recovery company to do it, or can somebody with 2-3 years of experience with hardware assembly, testing, and troubleshooting reasonably expect to figure it out and do it right?

Answer

You say this:

I’ve poked around enough to know that basically there’s two logical
parts to these things, the controller hardware and then the actual
storage itself. Is it possible to separate the storage and connect it
to another controller or some other type of hardware that can read it?

In general, all external drives are basically internal drives placed in “bridging” enclosures that allow the internet drive interface—whether that be PATA/IDE, SATA or even SCSI—to bridge to a more commonly used external interface such as USB, FireWire or eSATA.

So you can mostly likely open up the enclosure, pull out the physical drive—where all your data is actually stored—and just mount it via another bridging device. The good news is devices like that are fairly cheap.

You don’t say how you are attempting to connect the drive to your system; I will assume USB. So for example, let’s say the drive is a SATA (Serial ATA) drive with a SATA interface. You could probably just buy any cheap SATA enclosure, stick it in and away you go. For example, I really like these low cost SATA to USB enclosures you can score at Other World Computing for $9.00. Pop the drive out of the busted enclosure, stick it in there, power it up, hook it up to a PC and away you go.

But if this drive has an older PATA/IDE (Parallel ATA) it might be harder to find a cheap enclosure for PATA connections. In that case I would recommend getting something like this universal drive adapter which allows one to hook up a PATA/IDE, SATA or even eSATA drive to a USB equipped PC. No special drivers are needed; just plug the drive into the adapter as well as power, plug the USB cable into the computer and it should mount as expected.

But then you say this:

If the storage does not physically look damaged is it likely that the
data is still intact?

Hopefully, the answer is yes. The reality is most external drives that “die” just have their enclosure and/or bridging circuitry damaged; the drive itself should be fine.

For example, I once found a RAIDed FireWire drive discarded on the street that would not mount via the FireWire connector. Opened up the case, found two 500GB PATA drives in there. Hooked one up that was dead as a doornail. Hooked the other one up and it mounted fine! Turns out it was a drive filled with wedding photos and videos that I was able to return to the original owners who had pretty much given up on the drive for good.

Which all means your data recovery drill down list should be:

1. Remove the drive from the enclosure.


2. Figure out what interface it uses internally and get an enclosure or adapter that will allow you to mount it.


3. Cross your fingers and hope for the best!


4. If that all went well, pull all of the data off of that drive to a new drive.


5. Once the data has been copied, consider that old drive history; don’t use it for data backup or anything.


6. If none of that worked, well your next best bet is a data recovery service.

But option 6 is really the last ditch effort. I’d say 8 times out of 10, just pulling the old drive out and connecting to it via a new enclosure or data cable will let you recover data off of the device.