Ok, so I was answering a question on the Hyderabad startups forum and thought this might be useful to many others.
I not-so-recently had my external hard drive stop working – it wasn’t getting detected on any of the laptops at home. I was quite worried because it had all my pictures from the past two years and also my entire songs collection. I looked up on th internet quite a bit but there was no software solution to it. The only thing people suggested was to break the case open and use the hard drive in a different enclosure. So here is the way to do it –
(You’ll need to be ready to work with hardware for this)
- Try opening the passport enclosure (you may avoid breaking by opening it carefully) by wedging a credit card or a thin flat screwdriver
- Verify if the hard drive is working (it usually is – only the USB connector chip usually is broken).
- The HDD inside is a normal laptop hard drive – to verify if it is working, replace your laptop hard drive with this one, go to bios settings and run a hard drive test.
- If it is working, go buy an external laptop HDD enclosure (i got one for Rs. 300 in Ameerpet, you can get them in CTC, park lane as well) and put your old one inside it and use!