Read this before you do anything else
Stop retrying it, but this one is often better news than it feels.
A drive that will not spin is either being starved of power, which is harmless and fixable, or has a seized motor, which is not. Repeated start attempts are only dangerous in the second case, but you cannot tell which case you have from the outside, and the attempts that would confirm it are the attempts that would do the damage. So stop, and let the diagnosis come from measurement instead of from another try.
Emergency
External hard drive won't spin up
If your external hard drive won't spin up at all, the most useful thing on this page is above this paragraph, and it is free. What follows is what the fault usually turns out to be, how recoverable this class of failure is, and what it would cost, including the cases we would tell you to take elsewhere.
What this usually turns out to be
A dead external is the most over-diagnosed fault on this site, and usually the cheapest. Between the mains and the platters sit a power adapter, a barrel or USB connector, a bridge board that converts USB to SATA, and only then the drive. Every one of those fails more often than the drive does, and the desktop-sized enclosures that use an external 12V adapter fail at the adapter more than anywhere else. The drive inside a dead external is frequently in perfect health and has simply not been offered any power.
A portable external is a normal drive inside a plastic shell with a USB bridge board. The bridge fails far more often than the drive does, which is why a dead external is better news than a dead internal.
Power supply or adapter failurebetter news
The commonest cause on an external drive by a wide margin, and completely benign. The drive is untouched behind a dead power brick.
Failed USB bridge or interface boardbetter news
The drive never receives the instruction to start. The media itself is healthy.
Burnt or damaged PCBbetter news
The drive's own circuit board has failed, often at the TVS diode after a power surge. The platters are usually untouched.
Seized spindle motor or stiction
The mechanical case. The platter stack cannot turn, and correcting that means opening the drive.
What to check first on an external hard drive
- If it has a separate power adapter, that is the first suspect and the easiest to test. Check the barrel connector for play, and try a known-good adapter of the same voltage and polarity if you have one.
- For a bus-powered drive, use a rear USB port on a desktop or a mains-powered hub, and the second USB plug on the Y-cable if there is one.
- Feel the case for any vibration at all in the first few seconds after connecting. A drive that twitches and stops is being powered and failing to spin; one that is completely inert is probably not being powered at all.
What not to do
Do not open the enclosure and connect the bare drive to a computer to test it, at least not yet. Some external drives encrypt on the bridge board itself, so the drive taken out of that enclosure reads as unformatted, and Windows will offer to initialise it. Accepting that on a healthy drive is how a free fix becomes a paid recovery.
Try this before you pay anyone
Two checks that are safe, free, and settle it more often than you'd think
- Try a different power adapter of exactly the same voltage and at least the same current rating. On an external drive this alone resolves a large share of no-spin cases.
- Try a different cable and a different port, ideally on a different computer. A powered USB hub is worth trying for a bus-powered drive that may simply not be getting enough current.
- Listen closely with the room quiet. Faint spin-up and settle means the motor turns and the fault is elsewhere. Total silence, or a single soft click and nothing, points at the motor.
That is the whole of what is safe to try. Do not tap it, do not shake it, and do not put it in the freezer. All three are folklore, and all three have cost people data that was recoverable beforehand. If it does not spin after a known-good power supply and cable, stop there.
How recoverable this is
Genuinely bimodal, and the split is roughly even. Power, cable, bridge and PCB faults are ordinary work with good outcomes and no cleanroom involved. A seized motor is mechanical work that has to happen before anything can be read at all. Both start with the same free assessment.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- Whether the drive receives power and attempts to start at all
- Whether the fault is in the enclosure, the PCB, or the drive mechanics
- For a PCB fault, whether the adaptive data on the original board is readable
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
from $449
Failing or degraded drive (imaging required)
Bad sectors, slow reads, drops out under load. Imaged region by region on hardware built for unstable media, worst areas left until last.
What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable. You get one fixed figure after the assessment and it does not move afterwards. If we can’t recover what matters to you, there is no recovery fee.
Other faults on an external hard drive
Not spinning up on other devices
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.