Why Did My External Hard Drive Die?

Rezident

Rezident

Rezident

Soldato
Joined
29 May 2007
Posts
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Location
Dublin
Got a Westernal Digital My Book 250Gb for backups, and it just stopped truning on one day (only had it a couple of months). Hoped it was just the adapter, so I emailed WD, and in fairness to them, they posted out a replacement adpater for free immediately. This one has a light on it so I know it's working but still the hard drive will not respond, must be dead.

Any idea what might have killed it? This was my first external drive, I do normally have the USB wireless receiver for my broadband on top of it, that wouldn't have harmed it surely?

Sometimes leave my mobile in top of it, and ok, maybe cups of coffee but definitely never spilled any liquid on it. What kills external hard drives?
 
I've had at least two drives work fine once you take it out of the caddy, because it's the chipset (or something else) on the caddy that died rather than the hard disk itself. If you haven't already tried that, and you don't plan to return the unit (or the data is important), you could always try attaching the internal hard disk to a computer and see if the data is still there.
 
jhmaeng said:
I've had at least two drives work fine once you take it out of the caddy, because it's the chipset (or something else) on the caddy that died rather than the hard disk itself. If you haven't already tried that, and you don't plan to return the unit (or the data is important), you could always try attaching the internal hard disk to a computer and see if the data is still there.
Click to expand...

Oh ok, I didn't know you could just open them up. I'll give it a go, is it fairly straight forward?

It could well be the chipset, it just seems so soon for a hard drive to fail, never had one fail that fast before.
 
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