[BuriedThrice]

Almost two years ago I had a hard drive fail on me. I was using my laptop before work one morning and when I came home 8 hours later my laptop wouldn't start up. It would attempt to load but the screen would stay black. I was livid. I hadn't backed anything up (Please don't lecture me on backing up my stuff. I know now). The thing is, that was the second crash since I bought that laptop almost four years ago and I hadn't even had that drive for a year. So I took it out and installed a new drive and used that until I bought myself a new laptop a few months ago. In the meantime I saved that drive that crashed until I could come up with a way to salvage the data on it. I lost over 200GB of documents, music, movies, pictures.

So fast forward two years later, I've got my new computer and I just recently bought a SATA to USB cable. Whenever I connect the drive my computer will lock up for a while as it tries to load the faulty hard drive. It'll recognize in the Computer folder but it won't fully load for me to explore the contents. I've tried this on two laptops now. I even put it back into the old laptop after freezing the drive for 24 hours and it gets to the Windows logo loading screen but then nothing. It sits at a black screen.

Obviously this drive still seems to be functioning. There are no clicking noises, it runs, it''s fully recognized. I just don't know why it locks up the way it does. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks a lot for the help.

[Scleros]

Obviously this drive still seems to be functioning.

No, it's function-ish. If data cannot be transferred to and from the drive over an extended time, it isn't functioning properly. Failure does not have to be catastrophic.

The data might be recovered by a data recovery company, however the more you fiddle with it the more difficult recovery may be.

Do you have a backup of your backup? ;)