[X] My Assistant

[tedstryk]

Yes, it happened again. The good news is that, after the bitter experience of the crash at the end of 2005, I had plenty of backups. The drive that crashed was the drive that I use to store HST data. There were only a few of my own projects stored on it, and I have recovered most of them (I got it to limp along for a little while). So this crash is more of an annoyance (especially given that obtaining HST data is time-consuming). Any tips on getting an external hard drive working? For the record , it was my own stupid fault. I was cleaning the area I keep it and pushed it up against a file cabinet to get it out of the way. Then I moved some other stuff in front of it. What that did was block all its vents, and it overheated.

[djellison]

If you're desperate - you can swop the outside circuitry with an identical model piece of kit. If you're REALLY desperate, you can swop the platters into an identical drive that works. If you're a millionaire, you can give it to a data recovery team The first two have both worked to some degree for me in the past.

Chances are - if it's a SATA drive, you can just open up the enclosure and drop the disk into your machine and have it work.