HACKS:

Good one Jason. One of my IDE hard disk packed up after not being in use for many months. An electrolytic capacitor has shorted and burnt a track. Repaired the track and used a salvage cap from another junk.. the disk is working ever since.

I had an 80GB hd go so far bad that all it would do is click and grind. Three weeks of running a SpinRite level 5 diagnostic on it 24/7, with a fan blowing constantly to keep it from overheating, and I recovered 96% of the data on it. That was over a year ago, and it is still one of my main drives. I now make it a point to run it on every drive that comes in the house, and have saved myself from quite a few 'gotchas'. At $80 it might not be cheap, but neither is a first aid kit or fire extinguisher, and, like those, the consequences of not having it when you really need it don't bear thinking about.

The first generation of Maxtor OneTouch, and I think the OneTouch II's for the most part, were famous for dying. Sometimes the LED circuit would give way, sometimes it was worse.

The first signs were usually Windows not wanting to detect it, then it developing a 'preference' for one port over the other (either the firewire or the USB would start failing), then the board in the enclosure would short, frying the drive's controller board.

Either way it was an easy fix, pick up a new controller board for the drive off of ebay and replace the enclosure. It was a shame, too...most of those enclosures were easy to work on and high quality, just crappy circuits.

I normally tell folks to go check if their controller board or drive is still on ebay first when they've got a 'dead drive'. 90% of the time, this will fix it.

How to mitigate having to recover data from an external drive

Have 2 drives in a software RAID1 (mirror). Monitor it so you know when one of the drives fails so you replace/fix it. This will increase the reliability 50%.

10 years ago software RAID was too slow and hardware RAID was too expensive. You can buy dual RAID external drives reasonably nowadays. If you have a faster CPU (2GHz) or multicore CPU, you can do software RAID w/o slowdown.

How long did it take to fill that drive? If it's just downloads, 320 GB will take over 180 hours over a 5 Mb/s internet connection. If it's a single 320 GB file and the pipe averages 5 Mb/s. That's a lot of time to waste.

I've seen a number of these external drives "silently" die (ie. no clicks of death, just a quiet unwillingness to work). Most of the time it's been a faulty board, so you can pop the case and plug the drive into a regular PC (or use any number of external USB adapters).

For anything I can't replace (photos), the data are on (at least) 2 external drives. I only use single disks for stuff I can recreate if necessary--ex. DVDs. Years in IT Engineering has taught me that even the most redundant arrays can die a horrible death.

I had the exact same problem, and fixed it the exact same way. Replaced the board and now it works and got all my data back. Still have to troubleshoot the old board. Time vs. cost at this point.

Recently my Western Digital 1TB hard drive died, is there anyway i can recover my data from it?

Had the same trouble with a SimTech 160 Gig drive. I took it out of the enclosure (warranty expired) and installed it directly into my linux box, configured the mount points, and it worked like a charm. I gave up the convenience of moving an external drive from box to box, but gained quite a bit in performance - ultra IDE vs. USB.