Broken External Hard Drive

[r_j_k_p]

Have got a 750gb external seagate hard drive. Have had it for about 2 years. Heard a small pop from it today and ever since, it won't be recognised by the PC when connecting via USB.

So i dismantled it, and plugged in the actual hard drive via SATA to the pc. I can hear the drive spinning, however it is still not recognised by the PC. It isn't being picked up at all.

I have lots of important data on there and would very much want it back, and was wondering what is the best soultions to try?
I have heard of putting the hard drive in the freezer? but wanted confirmation first. If i did try this, how long would i put in there for?

Many Thanks to anyone that can help me get back my data.

[ritchiem]

You need to weigh up how much the data is really worth to you. Freezing might work or it might damage the drive more. Some people have had good success with the freezing thing. Personally if the drive is miss behaving a raw disk copy under linux is the safest way to get the data off IMHO. Random access via windows/osx/some gui is only going to add strain. I forgot this and only got 20mins of data copy off my failing drive. Had I just done a raw copy I might not have needed to send it away Then again if I had a backup

Search the forums for 'Hard Drive Data Recovery'. I've sent my drive off to OnTrack (.com) which will cost £75 to find out what they can recover then ~£400 to get the data.

[peterb]

The freezer trick really applied to older drives that had a mechanical failure - yours sounds more like an electronics failure - possibly capacitor failure.

Assuming that you can't restore from the backups, you are really down to trying to identify the defective component (if you can) and replace it (again - if you can) or return it to a data recovery specialist. It won't be cheap.