external hard drive has disappeared!

[Coleman]

i run my external hdd through my 360 in order to watch movies (WD elements 1TB drive FYI). Last night, in the middle of a show, xbox decided it didn't like it any more and refused to play that one file, or any others. I've now plugged it into my laptop to have a look and it's not coming up in any way at all. tried looking through diskpart and through disk management on my computer, but neither are showing it as plugged in.

[jt999]

Is it in device manager as a device at all?

[Coleman]

not at all

[jt999]

Sounds awfully dead... Sure it's powered up?

[Coleman]

Yeah, powering up fine. can hear it spinning, led flashes as normal. Think i'll have to get someone to open it up and just get any data they can off it.

[jt999]

You can probably pull the hard drive out, it'll be a standard drive inside I'm sure.

[Hardcore]

Take the HDD out of it and if you have a desktop computer, attach it internally to that to see if it detects it.
If it can't it's toast and data recovery isn't cheap at all.

[Coleman]

only have a laptop. pretty pissed off as i've only started using it for the past month or so, after having it in the box for well over a year. Moved the first 6 months of pictures of my little one over only last week.

- - - Updated - - -

will have a look if the computer guy at work can do anything with it.

[Hardcore]

[jt999]

Don't back up a back up, if your backup is corrupt you end up backing up the corrupt files.

Ideally you should back up to at least 2 locations, one in your house (I use a second drive in the same PC with an hourly rsync) and one offsite (I backup nightly to Amazon S3). If you had a fire you'd lose it all otherwise - I've been there...

[Hardcore]

I've got an internal drive that's seperate from my other drives for storing photos and videos ect. I use that for them only.
I've got a hot swap bay on my tower as well for 3.5" drives so i just use another 1TB drive as if it's a USB pen stick and do back ups every few weeks. There's about 1.5TB of storage and with 512k upload it would take a while to back it up remotely.

[Tim]

If you have just transferred all your photos from your laptop, I'm guessing the laptop is fine? I would try a software data recovery on the laptop first. You never know, you may be lucky and able to find all of the photos on there.

I backup all my important photos on iCloud, my phone, my laptop and a back up on my mams laptop. Couldn't give a crap about anything else.

This has reminded me to find a good cloud storage, iCloud is good but thought I would compare prices?

[jt999]

Amazon S3, then set it to auto transfer to Amazon Glacier each day, think I paid about $1 this month for 80GB of data

[Tim]

That's good, I'll take a look at that.

[Coleman]

I'll take a look at cloud storage as well. I basically, cut and pasted all the files to the HDD, would a file recovery program find them?