I bet everyone who's used an external hard drive, or any computer for that matter, has faced problems with their hard disk. It can be as small as a corrupt MBR or as big as the infamous and irreparable 'Click of Death'.
I've come across a variety of problems like a corrupt MBR, a faulty hard drive enclosure and finally the Click of Death.
Corrupt MBRs are very easy to identify - most of the times when you plug in the drive it asks you to format it even though there's data on it. This is a good sign because it shows that your hard drive is detectable and it's only a software glitch that can be fixed. The program I used to solve an MBR problem a friend's drive had recently was Partition Table Doctor. It was really easy to fix and took less than a minute!
On the other hand a friend of mine dropped his hard drive and now it won't even initialise. That's almost 1TB worth of precious data gone! What annoys me is the fact that hard drive manufacturers offer 3 to 5 years warranty but none of them recover your data for you for free! What's the point of the warranty then?! They just give you another hard drive as a replacement while you sit there wondering - what if the same thing happens to this one?
Hard drive manufacturers should seriously think about providing free data recovery services. Or another suggestion (well I can't call it a solution) is not to store really important stuff on your hard drive - instead use online backup services like Mozy. This has saved my data quite a lot of times in the event of hard drive failures and system crashes and I highly recommend it! The free version provides 2GB worth of backup space which I can say is enough for me to store my really important files.
So there we go, those are a few of my tips and tricks I use to avoid major hard drive problems - oh, and one more, don't throw your hard drive around and treat it like shit unless it's a SSD.
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