I hope this is the right place for this question. I have a seagate freeagent 1.5 TB external hard drive. It connects to my pc via firewire. It was knocked off the shelf last night and the firewire port broke off and now is inside the external drive. The device still powers up and runs, but I can not connect it to anything since the only port is now broke into. Is there anyway that I can fix this, open it up and repair it, connect it internally to my pc or just save the data? I really do not want to lose all my work on this drive. Any help or suggestion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
The hard drives inside most external drives are regular 3.5 SATA. You can always take it out and slave it into your computer. It'll work like a normal SATA hard drive. As far as fixing it, when you open it up, you can check the damage to the connector. Maybe it poped loose and you can reaattach it. Opening the external drive will void the warranty, but if your data is valuable that is the only way to recover it. If you sent the external drive back to seagate, they won't repair it, they just exchange it. Also they won't recover the data off the old drive due to privacy reasons they just format all drives they recieve.
Finally I got it open. It appears the firewire peice has come apart from whatever it was attached to. I am guessing the board. Is this something I can just snap back on? I notice that the only way to do that is to unscrew some screws from the drive. I just didnt want to do it unless this is something that can be snapped back in. Any advice?
The hdd is a separate component so it can be removed to whatever is attached to it,it's best to lay the bits you remove in sequence & lay them on a table,helps to take photo's as each bit is undone so you know where everything goes,as for re attaching the firewire bit,it will no doubt be soldered to a part of the circuit board inside the housing you will need to check no joints have broken,when putting everything back together don't over tighten anything,best bet is grab the screw driver shank & use finger tightness (thumb & the next finger to it) just so the screws butt up this avoids stripping
get a new sata drive enclosure as is the easiest & quickiest method to retrieve info off the drive as long as drive is ok.
My tech literacy only goes so far. If I get this sata drive enclosure, what will that do..or what do I need to do in order to retrieve my data?
your drive uses a sata interface not ide so need a usb2/firewire sata drive enclosure. connect the drive to new enclosure & connect it to the pc & as long as drive is not damaged then still able to get at info.
Actually, one last question. Would it be possible to transfer the data from the dropped drive to another external drive? Would I just connect the two together via usb/firewire?
as your firewire connection is broken then either need a new enclosure to access the info or direct connect to the motherboard. can transfer info off 1 enclosure to another enclosure thru the computer usb/firewire ports.
It looks as though the firewire port can not be attached. It looks as though I may make it into a drive inside my pc instead. Once I get that installed, will my pc automatically recognize it? My pc wont try to format it and erase the content...would it?
