Fried hard drive

Disaster!!!! Plugged the power supply into my external hard drive on wednesday without checking the voltage and gave it 9volts instead of 5. According to the local repair shop there is nothing that can be done with it. Fortunately MOST of the pictures on it have been stored somewhere else but the more I think about it, the more I remember the ones that aren't

Ah that is fortunate you have another backup, with all my laptops, tablets & phones etc this is so easily done. I only use 2.5" portable hard drives now, the power pack issue is getting ridiculous in our house now...

I guess you're not using the power supply that came with it then as they normally aren't switchable?

You may be able to take the hard disk from the caddy and mount it in your PC / new caddy.

Yes, thee is a very good chance that the enclosure is blown, not the drive itself.

You can buy new enclosures pretty cheaply (try Maplin/7dayshop). Or pay a lot of money to a company to do it for you.

It is more by luck than judgement that i have other copies of most of the work, my internal hard drive was getting so full that I started deleting from it
It didn't come with a power supply, I only started using one recently as it wasn't getting enough power through the USB.
According to the bloke in the shop it has gone beyond that but I think I'll get a second opinion.

This is getting worse as I have found that I didn't have any other copies of the shots from my 2 week trip to Scotland
I am wondering if I can retrieve shots that I have downloaded into the gallery and to photobucket?

What's the actual internal drive?
As a worst case scenario, it may be possible to exchange the drive controller board to rescue yours...

...but I'd get a second opinion first. Very likely you fried the USB-SATA controller board. Possible the drive remains intact.

I use several Seagate GoFlex drives which have an unpluggable chunk at the end (so you can upgrade the main drive to eSATA, Firewire etc). It's actually a very useful USB2-SATA interface and have used it many times for just rescuing and formatting laptop drives

HTH!
Matt

If the deleted files are in the recycle bin you will be able to restore them.

John

Matt,
I think the make is ATMI, I have looked for another one the same with no luck.Do I need exactly the same one?
Unfortunately John, recycle bin has been emptied to free up space

Also, you may be able to recover from memory cards, even if you have reformatted and overwritten them.

Best advice, keep everything as it is now until you have checked every possibility.

Ah well, speaking from experience it won’t happen again.

John

Have you checked inside for burning etc. I had a similar happening a few years back with a Sony recorder (I realise that it's trivial by comparison). I noticed that a fine track from the power socket to the regulator chip had fused. Soldered in a piece of thin telephone cable (huge by comparison) and hey presto it still works.

Regards
Bernard

I agree with MattMagic - the controller board is probably fried but if the data is valuable you can always purchase an identical drive and move the controller board over (or ask someone into electronics to do this for you). I've seen this done before with great success.

Good luck!

Thanks all for your advice and sympathy. I wont give up on it just yet