Toshiba 500GB external drive problem

[jovan]

Hello,
I have a problem with my toshiba drive. I bought it from Germany before three months. It worked ok, but now when I plug it in it makes a sound like a tik every second for 30 seconds then it stops for 1 minute and then again for about 20 seconds the tik noise. After that it don't appears in the auto play. When I go to device manager there is a yellow sign with an ! in it. it has the name usb mass storage device.
I don't know what to do I have about 200 GB storage on it and it is very important to me.
So if anyone knows what should I do please write me!
Thanks for reading!

 

[SNGX1275]

Its dead.

OR

It isn't getting enough power, I've seen that happen on connecting some externals to laptops with weak USB ports. Try it on a different computer, but if the same thing happens, you are screwed.

 

[jovan]

Please look at this video, I made it so that you can look what it does
Thank you anyway

 

[SNGX1275]

Yep, dead. Not that it mattered in this case, but I don't think you can ever expect a drive to run long after you've opened it up.

 

[jovan]

Than tell me what should I have done? I have about 5000 songs, 160 films and so many games and pictures it was about 350 GB full of all the files that are important to me!

So you think I can't do anything to return my files?

 

[SNGX1275]

There is really nothing you could have done. For a few thousand dollars you can send it to a data recovery lab and they can probably get your stuff back.

The pros might have taken the cover off too, but they would have done it in a clean room.

You could try to buy the exact drive from ebay, and then switch out the PCB, and you may have a few minutes to recover the most important things before some dust that got in there screws things up. And that is assuming the PCB swap even fixes the original problem.

One thing you can for sure take out of this is the importance of regular backup and that you never want to have important data in only 1 location (1 drive incase of failure, and if you are real paranoid or its terribly important 1 physical location - as in, offsite backups).