retrieving info from an external hard drive

[marty_mcfly]

i had an external hard drive that all of the sudden, just stopped working. i had it taken apart and the HD was taken out. is there anyway i can retrieve the info on it? i got some important stuff on there.

[jopa489]

There are a few options here.

You can try a SATA/IDE (whichever the drive is) to USB cable, or putting the drive in your machine (if it's a desktop). That will tell you if it was just the external enclosure that's broke, or the drive itself.

If it's the enclosure, then you got lucky. Pull your files off and you're good.

If it's the drive, then you might need to send it off to be recovered - depending on how important the data is. Not sure how savvy you are with this stuff, I could walk you through a few things you can try on your own. But let's see if it was just the enclosure first.

Remember to back up important stuff to multiple types of media. Drives are so cheap these days, there's no reason not to have some redundancy for important data.