External hard drive problems

[The Professor]

Ok, well I had to reformat because something screwed up and all my stuff was backed up onto the maxtor external hard drive. Sods law decided to take over and the hard drive broke at exactly the same time as the computer did. When I put the power cable in the little green light flashes and I can hear the hard drive spinning up, then after about 5 seconds it stops and nothing happens.

My questions are:

- Does anyone have any idea what's going on with it and if it can be fixed?
- If it can't, can i break open the casing and just shove it into the computer? What sort of connections is it likely to use it use? Its definately a 3.5" drive, I don't know the model of it though, it was from Argos so their site might have it.

Thanks in advance :)

[N!ck]

Possibly not My friend's 250GB Seagate did a similar thing, and no matter what i wasn't able to recover any data.

Depending on how old it is, it could be an IDE connection.

The best way to attempt to fix it would be to use a file rercovery program that can try to recover screwed up drives without formating them first. If that fails then format it to the same file system it ws before (probably FAT32) and then try some recovery programs on it. You should be able to put it in your computer and use it as an internal drive if all else fails.

[The Professor]

It isn't old at all, I bought it in October last year. Will it be SATA if it isn't IDE or will they have some other weird proprietary connection?

The problem, as far as I can see, isn't that the computer can't read it, its that power isn't getting to it properly. When its plugged in a green light on it usually pulses, that isn't happening.

[N!ck]

If it's not IDE, it will be SATA. Which is it? One of these or older? http://www.maxtor.com/gb/external-drives/external-hard-drive/

[Recursion]

Take it out and shove it in your PC, I had a WD external HDD fail on me once and it was the casing's power supply, not the HDD