I had backed up a lot of stuff to an external usb Hard Disk Drive. It conked out one day.
I saw there was some common fault with the arm not returning or something so I opened it up to have a look. It didn't help. Would it be possible to disassemble the unit a bit more, transfer the disk itself to another chassis and hope to read the disk?
Obv I am too mean to send it off for repair.
TW
If the data is important then put the cover back on and send the drive to a data recovery company. Tell them what you've done and don't make things worse than they already are by doing any more fiddling. This problem isn't suitable for a DIY approach.
+1.
The only successful data recovery I ever did was on an old HDD drive that simply wouldn't do anything, where I swapped the driver board with an identical unit.
We got the data off and scrapped the drive
One thing to note today, when you swap controller boards, you
now have to swap the EEPROM on the board. There are several
EEPROMS, and one of them presumably contains the FDE keys.
And that has to be transferred, so the drive can read the
data to your satisfaction.
It's true, that for older drives, the swap is not required,
because the drive is less sophisticated. And the word
"encryption" had not been invented yet.
There was a press release years ago, promising that all drives
of a certain date, would be FDE-equipped. Then... nothing happened.
But the EEPROM issue, is a side effect of "the things we don't know".
Just because they didn't have a launch party for their new toy,
does not mean it is not at work in there.
If a controller board swap does not work for you, that could be
the reason.
Paul