External Harddisk

Home » CentOS » External Harddisk
CentOS 12 Comments

I have an old external harddisk, Toshiba 320 Gb, with a USB connector that I wanted to check for contents. It did not start up when connected and I could not hear the motor spinning. After leaving it in the freezer overnight the motor spins but it is not recognized by my computer. I disassembled it and could see that the head assembly rests outside the disk but when it is powered on, the head first moves to the center of the disk, then to the periphery and finally back to the resting position. This happens every few seconds and leaving it connected overnight changed nothing.

I installed smartmontools but the disk is not even recognized by my system as a /dev/sd* device and therefore not accessible to smartd (at least as far as I know it.)

Any suggestions for what I could try? I am running CentOS 7.

Thank you.

12 thoughts on - External Harddisk

  • Usually such devices had an ide or sata port and the USB connection was made with an interface module. Maybe you can connect the device directly with an ide or sata adapter and see if it shows up there.

    It’s also quite normal that a drive doesn’t spin up after being powered of for a long time. Moving the drive around in your hand so that the disks can turn inside can help to make them going.

    Regards, Simon

  • That repeated seeking suggests it’s not passing its self test, and is constantly retrying. It’s probably searching for servo data on the disks, and not finding it.

  • I see. I have not searched for any low-level disk utility from Toshiba, the manufacturer of the disk. Do you think that might be worthwhile to hopefully fix this?

  • It has a SATA-interface and I could try that but not in the next few days unfortunately. As I said, putting it in the freezer dislodged the disks and I had tried moving/shaking it prior to that but this did not help.

  • Since you have taken the disk apart it will now be useless as within the enclosure there could have been a vacuum or an inert gas.

    You will never be able to recover any data on the disk unless you go and pay for a professional data recovery organisation to read the platters.

    The price for a replacement 340GByte USB disk is about $25 which would give you a better product than your old disk.

    Mark

    —–Original Message—

  • From what I know gas filled disks didn’t exist in the times when 3X0GB was on a 2″ drive.

    No, if he did care that the disks didn’t become dirty then the drive should still work quite well to recover what is on it. Of course the cover should be put on ASAP. If you don’t believe me, just try it our yourself.

    The OP wanted to recover what is on the disk, not use it as a normal disk.

    Simon

  • Simon, you are correct in all the above and I replaced the cover as soon as I had ascertained the movements of the head assembly.

  • No, old drives were filled with air usually, and were connected to exterior atmosphere via porous barrier. That is why regular drives are much more likely to fail up in the mountains, say where the is about 1/2
    of normal atmospheric pressure. Pressure inside ordinary drive is the same as external pressure, and heads are just spring loaded and are resting on platter surface, and are pushed away from it when platters spin (hence so called “parking track” ). Air works as viscous liquid at these relative speeds, and the law is at least cubic, so at 1/2
    atmosphere heads are much closer to platter surface. Therefore, failures are quite likely. Sealed drives are still not wide spread, He (helium)
    filled would be one type. But sealed drives existed even some 25+ years ago (to be used at Astronomy observatories high in mountains, e.g.). I
    remember HP drives of that kind that costed $10k apiece back then, and those dollars, not today’s dollars.

    What you are right about is: the drive upon opening got contaminated with solid dust particles, and will not serve long. But fair chance is, one still will be able to get data off it.

    While he may be able to recover data, professional recovery are more likely to succeed. They will be not happy to work with drive that was opened not in a “clean room”, and my charge more. Be it I, I definitely will tell them that drive was opened not in clean room, they will know anyway once they have drive.

    Valeri

    —
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Opening up disk drives outside of a lab environment is NEVER a good idea if you expect the device to be useful.

    I’m thinking this disk problem is tied to your more general usb problem.

    There is a guy with a shop in NYC called Louis Rossmann who MAY be able to help with your data recovery.  Look him up on youtube or just google the name.

  • No. I tried this disk on other computers and it has nothing to do with USB. Further, I have other similar disks which do work on this computer.

  • I don’t know whether testdisk would be helpful in this case or not but your options are limited, might give it a try.