Problem with external hard drive

[Alfiedog]

Hi all .... Help!! I have used a GRaid external drive to archive a large number of old images - around 15,000 or so; an accumulation of stuff from years of snapping! Following an office move and the acquisition of a new iMac the GRaid has been stored in a cupboard for around a year or so. Yesterday, I got it out to see if I could find a specific image I know I took around 6 years ago - thankfully nothing vital - and it is refusing to start up. It sounds as if it is trying to get going, it’s not totally dead, but it won’t fire up as it should and certainly isn’t talking to my iMac. During storage, it has been kept on its side due to space restrictions and I’m wondering if that has caused something to seize up. Any advice would be very gratefully received. Thanks all .......

 

[ac12]

Take it to a computer store that does repairs.

• Position of the drive during storage should not make a difference.
• Treatment of the drive could. Especially if it was roughly handled.
• Check that the power supply is the correct one for the drive. A PS that is too small will not be able to power up the drive.
  
• It could be a simply a loose connection in the case. This should be easy and relatively inexpensive to fix.
• It could be "sticksion" which may be fatal. Sticksion is when the head sticks to the disc platter, preventing it from spinning.

ALWAYS have a 2nd backup, located in a physically different place.

 

[greybeard]

Just for the heck of it, try it with a windows computer.

 

[TCampbell]

How old are the disks? Was the raid more or less in continuous operation when you were using it?

Sometimes the startup motor (on an old drive) wont be able to supply enough torque to spin up the disk... but the motor would have enough power to keep the disk spinning if were already spun up. It is not unusual for old storage arrays to have multiple spindles that refuse to spin up.

There are some (elaborate) ways to get your data back ... but it depends on how much you want your data back.

Check the power to make sure you're getting an adequate supply of power. If the array is cold, it may be harder to spin up then if the spindles are warm (e.g. if it warms up out in the sun ... it may be easier to start than if it's in a cold air-conditioned room.)

Ultimately, it is possible to remove each disk one at a time... and if you can find an enclosure capable of spinning up that disk, you can clone it to a new disk. This is time consuming and requires you know what you're doing (normal copy programs aren't going to work, but unix systems (for example) have utilities that can copy blocks from a "raw" device to another "raw" device ... so there's no need to mount the disk as a filesystem. Once that is done to every disk, the fresh disks could be inserted into the array and they would spin up and mount.

And then if you've really got deep pockets and want your data back, there are forensic labs that will crack open the disks, remove the spindles, put them on a special machine, and duplicate them onto a new drive. This is _really_ expensive.