Electronics

[glb613]

I got the hard drive, bought an external enclosure and it's no longer working.  There was no rotation, no sounds of the disks spinning and nothing was visible.  I'm not sure what I'll do next.  I know I'm not taking a hammer or drill to it.  I was really hoping it was the power supply or motherboard causing the computer to fail.  While I have a current backup, there are individual files I'd like to access. 

[gardenman]

There are data recovery experts who can retrieve data from dead hard drives, but they're absurdly expensive. If you're sure the hard drive enclosure is working properly, then that would be your only real option. The data recovery guys typically work in "clean" spaces, either a clean room or under a filtered air hood, and will carefully remove the platters from your broken hard drive and put them into a comparable functioning hard drive then copy the data onto new media and return that media to you. It typically costs a lot, thousands of dollars is not atypical, so it's somewhat impractical.

If you have a known good hard drive from an older computer you might want to try plopping that into your new enclosure to be sure the enclosure works properly. There's always some chance that the enclosure could be malfunctioning.

[glb613]

I can't do that because the other hard drives I have are not SATA drives and won't fit the new enclosure.  When I get my new iMac,  I'll try to hook it up and see if can read it.  Who knows, it may be more than one hardware item which went bad.  When I had a dead hard drive with a Windows machine, I got a message "no operating system can be found".With my iMac, there wasn't a message of any kind. 

[gardenman]

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@glb613 wrote:

I can't do that because the other hard drives I have are not SATA drives and won't fit the new enclosure.  When I get my new iMac,  I'll try to hook it up and see if can read it.  Who knows, it may be more than one hardware item which went bad.  When I had a dead hard drive with a Windows machine, I got a message "no operating system can be found".With my iMac, there wasn't a message of any kind. 

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I don't have a lot of experience with Macs, but in the Windows world the POST (power on self-test) and BIOS would give the message you saw. POST typically tells you if there's a memory, hard drive, or similar issue. (There are a lot of things tested in a Windows POST.) In some cases you just get a beep or series of beeps, but in a more modern BIOS you typically get an onscreen display also. A quick Google shows Macs are a bit less informative and only really notify you of RAM issues in POST with a beep or beeps. The Mac POST looks a lot less informative than a Windows POST.