Buffalo Hard Drive Failure

[sillyman99]

I have a 500GB external Buffalo mini station hard drive.

The white logo light is on, I can feel the drive spinning, the blue LED light just briefly flashes then goes off, then beep beep beep as the computer fails to pick up the drive.

It's not the computers problem for sure, it's not cables as I have tried other cables and it still fails, my other drives work fine after trying a combination of cables and USB ports, so it is certainly the drive

The disc is full, has many TV series etc that I would like to keep, and I didn't back them all up, I'm lucky I copied nearly all for a friend and he is coming soon from the States so it's not a total disaster, but can I recover the data locally and cheaply ?

I live in Pattaya, I was thinking about Wattana computer opposite Foodland, Just wondering if anyone else had come across this problem.

The drive is whirring away, the logo light is on, its just not sending the data to my PC or my WDTV media player.

It hasn't been dropped either.

Cheers guys.

[yumidesign]

ooooooh dear i have the same model buffalo and Mac OSX, have had one experience where icon did not appear although logo light on and blue light for a moment, left the cables hooked up and restarted the computer and was ok, your post makes me very afraid!!!!!!!

[TigertheCat]

Hi Sillyman,

You could try Spinrite by Gibson Research,its a low level drive recovery tool,you can find this online or in Tukcom.

It might not even see the drive but worth a shot

www.grc.com

[Pib]

The drive problem does not sound promising at all, especially since you have switched cables, tried the same computer ports, etc. Sounds like the hard drive has had an electronics/circuit board or low level format failure.

Even if it was a low level format problem vs drive electronics failure and you were able to somehow recover some data, I would be afraid to use the drive for storage again. Over the years I've had a few drives act up like yours (Seagate and Maxtor) and it appeared initially to be a low level format problem. I lost my data, but I was able to do a new "low level" format via BIOS or special program and then accomplish the high level/DOS/Windows format. Then I got my programs reloaded.

So, I initially thought the drive heads might have hit the spinning platters (even through I hadn't moved the computer/drive), I didn't have a circuit board/electronics type problem, and the new low & high level formats had fixed the drive. However, the drive would work OK for a few weeks and then fail the same way..and it would always fail on power-up.. Something was just corrupting the low level format and a drive electronics problem was probably causing the failure (probably a chip on the board with an intermittent problem). I doubt the problem was a virus as I always ran a firewall / antivirus and a new drive always fixed the problem.

Good luck...hard drive failures are not fun events.

[TigertheCat]

Good advice from Pib,you may be able to recover the data but the drive is still a dud.<br>I had this happen to a Maxtor external drive and gave up on it and now only buy WD or Buffalo<br>I just bought a 500Gb Buffalo Mini Drive like yours but can happen to any brand/make so not so concerned.<br>

[sillyman99]

Good advice from Pib,you may be able to recover the data but the drive is still a dud.<br>I had this happen to a Maxtor external drive and gave up on it and now only buy WD or Buffalo<br>I just bought a 500Gb Buffalo Mini Drive like yours but can happen to any brand/make so not so concerned.<br>

Thanks all for the replies, yes I think the drive is a goner, it's just the data that I want.

I'll go to Wattana Computer tomorrow, buy a new 2TB drive and see if they can recover my data from the faulty drive.

Now I wish I had backed up everything already. Luckily I have most series on dvd data discs too, thanks again chaps.

[HDRIDER]

Hi

I have 3 Buffalo HD never had a problem, 1 have even been in my pool, dried it in front of a fan for 3 days, still working (only use for something i dont care about loosing now)

[lomatopo]

I would try the drive on another PC, preferably a desktop using a USB port on the motherboard (back panel). If it still doesn't work then just take to a shop where they can remove the bare drive and then connect it (or mount it) to a PC and transfer any data. You might consider bringing another HDD to facilitate the transfer.

[sillyman99]

Problem Solved.

The drive was OK luckily, it was the connecting circuit board that was at fault, old drive out, new external hard drive case 450 Baht, no problem, no data lost, phew !

I bought a 1.5 TB Buffalo external hard drive that uses AC power and has a cooling fan, 5290 Baht and will now back up all of my files to that and use that as my main media player drive.

By the Way, my buffalo external 500GB HDD used a seagate drive.

Cheers guys.