Recently, I purchased a 1TB Seagate Expansion External Hard Drive. It worked really well for 6 months, so I decided to buy a 2TB version. This 2TB version has un-mounted itself at random, normally after my CPU goes to sleep-mode. After filling the 2TB drive with 1.5 TB’s of data, all of the sudden I get an error message that this drive is about to fail, and will no longer stay mounted. I didn’t purchase a warranty. Now I’m stuck with a broken drive containing 1.5 TB’s of data, formatted in NSTF file system! Problem number one with recovery is trying to recover that much data. Through a USB Connection would take forever (Lucky if you get 300mbps speed). So like any Red-blooded hacker, I decided to rip it open and see what makes it tick.
The first thing I noticed is that there are no screws holding the case together. Instead, it’s actually snapped in place with about 12-24 plastic tabs. There is no possible way to remove these without breaking them, so, if you want to see what’s inside the sleek fancy case, you will VOID your warranty. But that aside, to open the case, all you have to do is take something thin inside the seam around the back where it’s flat. I chose to use a pocket knife. Once you slide that in, take a flat head screwdriver and carefully pry up on the case and the top will separate from the bottom very easily. Don’t worry- the drive is surrounded by a metal enclosure so you won’t damage it.
Once you have the plastic case separated, lift the metal container up and remove the 4 screws holding the drive inside. What you will get afterwards is a full-size 3.5 in” SATA disk drive. Amazing! You can also use the metal case to make an external drive holder. I noticed when taken apart that the vents for this Disk Drive are on the bottom! Yes! You heard correctly, the air-flow to keep this drive cool is located at the bottom of the case, so I don’t suggest stacking them on top of each other. It’s probably one of the reasons why my drive has died on me.
Since this means we have a regular SATA Drive, now we can either hook it up straight to our computer, or use another External Drive Reader with an ESATA Port for faster speeds. I bought one at BestBuy for about $60 USD that holds 2 SATA drives and can copy from drive-to-drive extremely fast.
Now it’s off to the races with trying to recover our data. My operating system of choice is Ubuntu Linux since it is fast, stable and has excellent support. We also have a few other options at the moment, depending on how bad off your drive has become. Personally, I suggest installing the Seagate Drive into a PC with your replacement drive, connected with SATA connections. Try not to use USB Externals unless you have only have a few MBs of Data to recover.
Personally, I used Hiron’s Boot-CD after setting up a CPU with my broken drive, and a 2TB Internal Drive to make the transfer. With Hiron’s Boot CD, I tried to use Ghost Copy but that didn’t work out so well, so I used The Unstoppable Copier to move each directory. This was a very time consuming and tedious process! (estimate about 10 hours for the full copy)
Tags: external hard drive, seagate, Tricks, usb connection