I have, in the past, had to literally BREAK the case on one of those prefab external hard drives. Once inside the hard drive itself comes out pretty easy. Let me know what you need. I can break it out if you don't feel comfortable doing it.

That's good to know because I wouldn't have suspected it. I'm a little concerned at having to break the housing since I obviously want to keep the drive itself safe. What tool would you recommend if I have to crack the case? Hopefully, I'll get the screws out and the case will just open.

When it comes to breaking something like that it's something I have to go by the feel. I know what to expect inside so when I take a flat head screwdriver and start prying and plastic starts splintering I can be confident I'm not doing any real damage.

All that thing is is an enclosure with a circuit board. There's a plug from the circuit board to the drive that communicates back and forth between the USB and the drive.

I suspect it's those electronics that have failed so we don't care about damaging that. It's the controller card on the underside of the hard drive we need to protect.

The fact that it has screws that seem to be accessible, albeit with the proper tool, it should not be a big deal. Just let me know.

Thank you. :) I took last night off from the effort to deal with the drive but I'm going to work on it again tonight. Got the screws out but looks as if I'll still be cracking the case.

I'll let you know if I run into any further difficulties. Hopefully, it'll be a piece of cake. *fingers crossed*

Well, frak.

The good news? I got it out and installed in a shiny new casing. I am completely NOT a mechanically-inclined person so I learned something new and that is a very cool thing.

The bad news? Apparently the drive itself failed and my gut feeling about what was wrong...was wrong.

What's it do when you put it in there? Is the system detecting anything when you connect it to the computer?

It powers up. I hear the disk spin up, which it had stopped doing in the old enclosure.

Windows knows I've plugged it in (again, this is better than when it was in the old case) but I get the following error message:

USB Device Not Recognized
One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and Windows does not recognize it.

Well, just arrange to get me the drive. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve. I don't need the USB enclosure, just the drive itself. Maybe Joe can give it to me when we play St. Pats weekend or you can give it to me if you come out.

I was planning to attend the St. Paddy's Day show so I'll definitely bring it with me. Should I also bring a pack of blank DVDs or something to burn content to? (I'm thinking positive here.) While I couldn't care less about the backup info in the first partition, the graphics files and Photoshop resources would be lovely to have; I think that I have about 80-100GB of data on that partition. Let me know and I'll bring it all with me.

Thank you!

Sorry for your HD failure. At least you unleashed your inner geek to try to fix it. As Homer once said, "You tried and failed...the lesson is, never try."

Incidentally, I ran into Ginger (not literally, fortunately) at the VW dealership today. Small world!

-yams69

I'm bummed that neither that nor the freezing worked. Frustrating, really, but it was a good thing for me to rip apart a drive. :) I never was interested in how things worked, only that they did. It's good to stretch one's comfort zone from time to time.

She mentioned it in a post here on LJ. I like to remind New Jersey-ites that Houston is larger than NJ. Y'all just live in a slightly smaller city than we do here in H-town. ;-)