How to Recover Your Data From Dead External Drive
Note
The following is for external drives that are out of warranty or potentially without a recuperation contract. Utilize those in the event that they apply, however warranties by and large do exclude data recovery. On the off chance that you require the data, you might need to attempt these tricks at any rate.
External drives utilize what's called a bridge board to handle communications between the USB/FireWire/Thunderbolt controller and the native SATA that the drive understands. Sometimes, it's this bridge board that fails, while the drive inside remains perfectly usable.
A third-party Kingwin 2.5-inch drive enclosure with the bridge board and hard drive removed.
To find out whether the drive is still viable, you'll need to transplant it--that is, remove it from the case, then attach it to the SATA controller of a desktop PC, or the spare 2.5-inch bay of a laptop if you happen one of those (and the drive is a 2.5-inch type and thin enough). If you want it to remain external, you can buy a new enclosure and use it in that.
With most third-party, and some 3.5-inch major vendor enclosures, it's easy to remove a drive. Simply remove a few screws to open the case, and remove a few more to detach the drive. At worst, you might have to pry off a few rubber feet to reveal the screws. Alas, especially with major vendors' 2.5-inch external drives, you might wind up prying apart glued plastic pieces to get to the hard drive itself.
Remember that the drive is useless unless you can remove it, so you may have to resort to brute force.
After connecting the drive to your computer. Power up the PC and see if the drive is okay, it should spin up and appear in Windows Explorer. If it doesn't, check Disk Manager to see if it's a foreign file system. You might have to boot using a live version of Linux, or use a Mac if it's EXT or HFS.
If the drive doesn't appear under Windows or Disk Manager, you have one more trick you can try--freezing the drive can keep a wonky bridge or controller chip alive long enough to pull off a few vital files.
If none of those tricks work, it's time for data recovery service. Assuming the data is that important and can't be replaced. Services vary in cost from expensive to very expensive.
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