Hard drive freezes explorer when connected via USB enclosure?

[Draeger]

Got a WD Caviar Blue 320Gb SATA HDD here from my brothers PC. It suddenly stopped working and he wants to try and recover data from it. We hooked it up to an external enclosure and connected via a USB cable but all it does is spins up, appears in explorer as a drive but when the drive is clicked on to attempt to open it explorer freezes solid until you power off the WD hard drive. Then explorer kicks back into life.

I've tried opening Disk Management and it shows 'Connecting to Virtual Disk Service' but then hangs at 'loading disk configuration information'. Again, switch off power to the HDD on the enclosure and explorer responds again.

Is the drive goosed? Is there anything else we can try before consigning it to the bin? Was wondering if booting to a Linux CD first then trying to read the drive might work but havent tried it yet.

 

[Rroff]

No harm trying with a Linux CD.

Sounds like the heads aren't working properly - few ways for trying to fix that to recover data but most of them result in the drive dying good and proper shortly after.

Its possible its trying to load a corrupt windows/system file from the HDD - Windows has a nasty habit of doing that - used to BSOD if you had a bad ntloader or ntfs.sys or something on even removable drives (though I think they fixed that in newer versions of Windows.

 

[Draeger]

Sounds like the heads aren't working properly - few ways for trying to fix that to recover data but most of them result in the drive dying good and proper

I'm all ears - at this stage we simply want to recover the data, if the drive dies afterwards then so be it!

 

[bledd]

Use this.

http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29

Unstoppable copier

Download this ready..

Reboot the PC.

Connect up the USB drive
Don't browse the drive in Explorer
Launch the program, set it to '1 retry', fast recovery.

Set it to copy from X:\ to C:\Recovery\ (or whatever drive/folder you have)


I've used this very successfully in the past when all other recovery software was failing.

 

[Draeger]

Thanks m8, looks just the ticket. Unfortunately as soon as I connect the faulty hard drive, anything else just stops what its doing. For example, I connect up the drive then start Unstoppable Copier. It scans and then just hangs there. As soon as I disconnect the hard drive Unstoppable Copier completes its operation. Its the same with anything else on the PC, as soon as the faulty hard drive is connected and any program attempts to access it be it a third party prog or simply me trying to browse it, the entire system stops. You can still move the mouse pointer and click on things to open them etc but nothing opens. Switch off hard drive in enclosure and *boom* - things open.

I guess its toast.

Also, most of the time I connect the hard drive up via the USB enclosure, it installs it as an ATA/ATAPI BRIDGE? Sometimes a couple of extra drive icons will show up too where I would have imagined it would only show up one?

 

[bledd]

-Don't use the built in menus to select the USB drive, manually type the drive letter in, if that makes sense.. otherwise it uses explorer again to do the 'browse' part.