I use a 120gig 2.5" SATA hard drive in an external enclosure to store all my original RAW image files. The other day it started clicking and reading slower, and I figured it was the IO board in the enclosure. Today the drive died completely... it wont work in the enclosure or plugged into the PSU and mobo of a PC. It just spins and clicks. Any ideas beyond the freezer tricks, etc?

If your PC is using a VIA or SIS chip set try the drive in another PC. Both those chip sets have compatibility issues with some drives. Other than that you are probably looking at professional recovery.

No, I've tried everything compatibility-wise. I'm considering just calling it quits and attempt to move the innards into an identical hard drive.

Short of sending the platters to a place that will do recovery on them, there is one way left to get the existing data off of it. This requires Linux, and another hard drive that is at least as big. Plug both hard drives into your Linux machine that is running off of yet another drive, or booted off of a live disk. Sata drives in Linux are listed as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, etc and the partitions are enumerated after then name (/dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc). If the source drive is /dev/sdb and the destination drive is /dev/sdc, and you are copying the first partition, do the following:

dd_rescue /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
or if dd_rescue is not there:
dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sdc1 bs=4k conv=noerror,sync

If your install was standard then it will be the first partition. You will need to create a first partition on the destination drive as well. This will do a byte by byte copy of the drive and write zeroes in the place of bytes that cannot be read. If you do not have a Linux machine download and burn Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org/), it will boot Linux without installing it.

Problem is, I think it has a bad controller. The BIOS won't even recognize it.

Posted by willskith Problem is, I think it has a bad controller. The BIOS won't even recognize it.

Have you tried removing it from the controller and plugging it directly into the motherboard? If that fails I would also try plugging it into different computers. Not all motherboards are made the same, some are more robust to hinky hardware than others. If you do try the direct connection, and another computer and the results are all the same, then it is definitely shot.

Posted by Seventh Stage Have you tried removing it from the controller and plugging it directly into the motherboard? If that fails I would also try plugging it into different computers. Not all motherboards are made the same, some are more robust to hinky hardware than others. If you do try the direct connection, and another computer and the results are all the same, then it is definitely shot.

I tried it on multiple PCs. If I did it directly without the controller, how could it be read? Doesn't it need the controller...

I meant to say enclosure. Have you plugged it into an open sata port on your computer?

yeah, and on two other pcs (each with a different mobo)
it wont show up in any BIOS

Posted by willskith yeah, and on two other pcs (each with a different mobo) it wont show up in any BIOS

That is too bad, sounds like your only recourse is to send it to one of those services that will do recovery from the platters.

Recently I saw a good review for one called DTI Data that does free estimates. They do not post prices so it definitely will not be cheap.