Hi all I have recently been rebuilding my PC but before doing that I copied Trainz to my Firelite mini hard drive.Unfortunately I dropped it and now it gets power (there's a faint humming from it) but my (old) PC can't see it.I've had the case open but there are no signs of damage.Has anybody got any idea whether this is repairable?
Dropping drives usually means damaged heads, may be ok if it was dropped on a carpet not a concrete floor!
It may just be the connectors inside have worked loose, should be a standard IDE or SATA connector on the back of the drive, just check it's pushed home firmly, some of the Sata IMO not very well made conectors don't require much to work loose.
If it had a USB cable plugged in at the time check that the plug and the socket haven't got damaged or bent maybe out of alignment, or waggle it and see if you can get any life.
These external drive enclosures usually contain a USB to ide or SATA interface, as it's a mini drive it's probably a laptop one so you would need laptop to normal drive adapter and the just connect it direct to the IDE or Sata connectors on the motherboard you may just get lucky and be able to get the drive to fire up, if is does work ok mini enclosures are relatively cheap, well in the UK they are, so just put it in a new enclosure.
I gave up with external drives too many problems with unreliable USB interfaces, I just filled up my Towers with Hard drives and back up to them.
