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My external hard drive spins for a few seconds and then stops. It contains very important data. How can I retrieve it?

5 Spice ups
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If the drive has physically failed and you have no backups, you’re going to have to engage a data recovery service that specializes recovering data from failed drives. It’s not cheap. Here are a few vendors, there are many that do this.

7 Spice ups
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With respect, if your data is very important to you, you should have multiple copies of it and not rely on a single HDD holding this data indefinitely.

If you do need to call upon a data recovery specialist, as noted this will cost you, however, if your data is important, then money should not be your primary concern.

7 Spice ups
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May also be beneficial to consider using cloud storage such as OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. That way you will always have access to your data

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+1 for hiring an experienced and reputable data recovery firm. If the controller is damaged but the platters are in good shape the odds of a successful recovery are decent.

I’ve used these folks in the past with good results: https://www.gillware.com/

2 Spice ups
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Ouch.

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if its “very important data” then you have backups right?

Otherwise please take this a a lesson learned and invest in some basic backup software to protect your data going forward.

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I’m assuming this is SSD? As nobody has suggested putting it in the freezer or tapping it on the concrete floor for a bit…
Plus one for pay the peeps who keep the deets!

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Unlikely.

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I missed that, but I would still say pay first if the data is that critical.

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If it spins and stops, it’s probably screwed—bad cable, port, or the drive itself is toast. Try a new cable or plug it into another port, but if it’s got important stuff on it, don’t mess around too much.

Just check this: https://www.salvagedata.com/external-hard-drive-keeps-disconnecting-solutions/. They recover data if things are really bad

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DriveSavers has saved one of my client’s assets. However, there might be a few tricks you can do that I’ve heard worked - once. and that is the only chance you’ll get. Myth or fact, use at your own risk. 1 - place in freezer, then while still cold connect to device. 2- we had another hard drive of the same make & model. Tech that I worked with was able to swap the control board with another, got it working. We transferred data off, trashed both drives. 3 - external drive enclosure.
I don’t recommend the freezer, but it did work. I’ve only heard of one or two people using said trick, and it did work for them.

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If its a bad controller you could try pulling the drive out of the enclosure and hooking it up directly to your PC. You could also figure out the make and model of the drive is and assuming its an older model, buy a used cheap one and replace the controller directly on the drive. We have done this once in the past with success.

Much cheaper than a drive recovery service. If it spins momentarily then it could be the source of power through external enclosures interface and simply pulling the drive from the enclosure and directly connecting to a PC may resolve your issue.

Note: Most likely you will break the enclosure though pulling it a part. They are not meant to be disassembled and then re-assembled

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External? Change the enclosure, it probably got fried. If that doesn’t work, your only other DIY option is to take the platter out and swap it with a functioning hard disk which is much easier said than done. The data is on the platter and everything else is the shell of the drive.

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I was actually able to do this once myself. It was a, “Well I be damned, that worked,” moment.

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