April 12, 2008 11:00 AM

Matt Whitlock said: With portable hard drives, you'll typically see one of three normal culprits. 1. Power supply failure ( somewhat common) 2. Electronic failure (not common) 3. Hard drive failure (common) Whether it's the enclosure's fault or the drive's fault is the important part to figure out, we need to start there. The former being tough to diagnose, the latter (hard drive) being pretty easy... and more likely depending on the kind of sound you're hearing.  Since the data is the important part, I'd say the best thing you can do to test the drive is to remove the hard drive from the enclosure and plug it into the motherboard in a PC as a second drive.  When you remove the drive, you'll need to determine if it's a PATA or SATA hard drive and see what your motherboard supports. Hopefully you'll have a match, otherwise you'll need to order a part to test this out. If the PC finds it and the drive spins up normally, you shouldn't have any problems copying your data over to your computer's main hard drive. If the drive seems fine, then all you need is a new enclosure.  If the drive doesn't spin up, then you're pretty much out of luck unless you want to invest in an expensive service to try and recover data from the drive. The best I can tell you is that you're not the first this has happened to. In the future, backup your data on a regular basis to more than one drive.

Thanks alot for your help I will try taking it out of the enclosure to see if it would spin up etc.