Ideas on recovering my Terabyte external..????

Mrock4

Hey guys. I'm hoping someone here has an idea..

While in Iraq, I bought a Fantom 1TB external HD. I originally had ordered two 500GB internals, but tigerdirect stopped selling that model, and failed to tell me..so 2 months later, I called them up, asking where they were..and they realized they didn't sell them anymore, and they were kind of caught in a backorder loop. They were cool about it, and gave me an instore credit..which is how I ended up with my 1TB.

While there, one of my buddies was cleaning up, and threw away my power cable to my TB (it was near a pile of trash that included an old DVD player, broken T.V, etc...). I was pretty mad, and needed drives ASAP for the storage space. I ended up taking them out of the case, and trying to use them in my desktop. No go.


After that, I eventually ordered a replacement cable (once I got back to the states), and the external didn't work. I've since tried installing the drives in my desktop PC, to at least reformat and use them as individual 500gb drives. No go..

I tried to use one drive as a master on the IDE cable, with the CD-ROM (and Ubuntu disk) as the Slave also on the same IDE cable. The computer will boot into Ubuntu off the disk, and when I go to install, it gets stuck trying to find a drive to install to. If I can get to the BIOS screen, I do see a drive listed as something like "GDE 0500"...


Any suggestions? I'm not too good with PC building/troubleshooting, I'm more of a cisco guy..

cisco_trooper

I feel your pain when it comes to these computers man. Is this an IDE drive?

Mrock4

Yeah, it's an IDE drive. I can fix 99% problems I have..but this is the only one I don't know where to start really.

SWM

Often these external drive "boxes" store data using aunique file systems and as a result the drives are not accessable via a normal IDE connector. This does not mean that you cannot format that drive in your PC, but just that if the data was stored via the external box you will need to use it to acces he data.

I have experienced this with Lacie and Netgear externals

Mrock4

Thanks SWM. Any idea on how come the drives aren't accessible via the Fantom enclosure they came in? I did move the jumpers around (after putting it in the computer and such), so I'm not sure what jumper settings they come with from the factory. I had figured just one as slave, one as master, but no luck. Also tried cable select.

SWM

would have thought both drives on "cable select" should be OK, unless you have a faulty drive ??

Mrock4

That's what strikes me funny..both drives stopped being read via IDE or the enclosure once I removed them from the factory IDE cable. I just can't imagine how much of a coincidence it'd be for both drives to be damaged physically after unplugging them. I'm going to give it another shot here in a minute. They both spin up, but won't be detected via USB.

SWM

Well if they are standard PATA drives they should install in a standard PC using cable select. If not they are faulty

Mrock4

This is depressing. Can't believe I lost $450 on this thing...

sigh..I guess live and learn. Thanks for the assistance.