Crap! Dropped my WD 1tb external...

[Angry]

So for whatever reason my Western Digital My Essential 1tb external drive landed with a crash behind my desk this morning...

Now it no longer shows up in device manager, or anything...
So I took the drive out, removed the USB controller, and plugged it in via SATA and it seems to work except that Disk Management is asking me to "initialize" it... Which means to format it right?

Im pretty sure its the USB controller that took the blow, because I took a 80gb SATA laptop harddrive and plugged into it and it also wont show up. It powers up and everything but does the same thing as the original WD 1tb that was with it...

And so far, according to "GetDataback" all the data is still on there...
But I dont have anywhere near enough to recover over 500gigs of family photos/home movies and all my other crap...none of the stuff on this drive is backed up anywhere else. So I really have to try to get it. I hadnt even gotin around to burning the stuff to dvds for backup...

Ideas? Im wondering of the "Initialize" has something to do with the fact when you plug the drive in via USB, it also puts in a virtual CD image with the WD software and such...


:bang head

[nightelph]

As far as backups go, DVDs aint gonna cut 500GB. You can grab a Blu-ray burner on the egg on sale, or for around the same price get an internal WD 1TB drive.

[Audioaficionado]

Just get the cheapest (5400 green label) largest internal hard drive you can afford and back everything up. Don't futz with your drive anymore until you can get enough space to back it up on another drive.

[ratbuddy]

As far as backups go, DVDs aint gonna cut 500GB. You can grab a Blu-ray burner on the egg on sale, or for around the same price get an internal WD 1TB drive.

The media also costs about $12 per 100GB for bluray, almost double what it would cost to just get another 1TB drive.

[nightelph]

The media also costs about $12 per 100GB for bluray, almost double what it would cost to just get another 1TB drive.

True true, but BD has other uses than just backups. :) Personally I would just buy another HDD.

[Angry]

Yeah, I think Im going to have to buy another drive... but Im going to ask a friend who just built a system and see if he has enough space to back up the data from the drive and put it back.

....Sucks.

Oh and about the DVDs, I meant I had meant to backup the family stuff to them at least...I can eventually live without the other stuff. I might dig out a couple of IDE drives and see if I can maybe get back the family vids/photos back at least before I do a full recovery.

[MitchV]

Oh and about the DVDs, I meant I had meant to backup the family stuff to them at least...I can eventually live without the other stuff. I might dig out a couple of IDE drives and see if I can maybe get back the family vids/photos back at least before I do a full recovery.

Personally, I've opted to use online backups for files of that nature (I use Backblaze though there are a number of alternative services). They typically run $5 a month or $50-$60 a year.

Regardless of the medium, a backup is worthless if a pipe bursts and your house floods or catches on fire. I had a safety deposit box at a bank for a while, but the task of bringing important files there just wasn't going to happen on a regular basis.