Data Recovery Forums - Help & Discussions

browny181 · Joined: 13 Aug 2010 Posts: 1

Any help or advice greatly appreciated. I've had a Buffalo Linkstation NAS Drive (HS-DHGL) for last 18 months. Started crashing a week ago - Would start up then after about 15 mins the data would be unobtainable, the unit would issue error beeps and would have to be left for some time before the process could start again. Having researched problems with this unit on the net, it appears similar issues are very common, and its often the hardware inside the support unit rather than the hard drive that fails. I think the beeps the unit was pushing out referred to a possible fan failure, but I could be wrong.
Buffalo do offer to replace the whole unit in the event of such a failure - but you lose all your data. This drive was a family network backup drive, and contains everything from the last 5-6 years, photos, videos, music etc.
I made the decision to try and remove the internal 320GB HDD, and following a video on YouTube, was successful without any problems. The HDD transpired to be a Samsung HD321KJ SATA HDD. I purchased a SATA HDD USB Docking Station, thinking I'd hopefully be able to simply push the drive into the docking station, plug the USB into my laptop, and I'd hopefully be able to see all my data and drag it off to a new backup drive.
I've done this, the drive certainly powers up and spins, but I can't see it's contents through Windows Explorer.
When plugged in the laptop notices new hardware and tells me its installed and ready to use. In Device Manager, its listed under Disk Drives as a Samsung HD321KJ, as well as the internal HDD in my Vaio, but it isn't listed in any of the available drives in 'My Computer'.
I've no experience with SATA drives, having previously only dealt with IDE ones.
I'm confident but obviously not entirely sure that the data is still there on the drive - but I just can't see it.
Any ideas of how I might be able to get at it without having to send it off in the first instance to expensive data recovery...?
For info the jumpers don't have any connectors on at all and are all free.
Any help or ideas gratefully received... many thanks, Andy