The natural response is to begin plugging things in. Do not allow yourself to do this for at least 60 seconds. Attach your drive and observe: is there a light coming on? Is there an even slight vibration within the enclosure from spinning platters? And is the drive making some type of noise it was not making a month ago? The answers to these questions will typically place just about every missing hard drive into one of three categories (either there is an issue with connecting to the computer, the files are disorganised because the file system has collapsed, or the physical components are failing), and each category requires a completely separate response. Most people guess as their very first action. The minute is not a guess.
One observation stands out from all the rest, so we'll start with it. If your drive makes clicking, ticking, beeping, buzzing, or spinning noises and then stops and starts again, there's a mechanical problem with either your heads (which cannot read data) or your motor (which is working hard). For each additional minute of power, these faulty heads will continue to rub against the surface upon which your files are stored. Stop using the drive, unplug it and go to the final section. None of what follows will apply to a drive that makes a noise, and attempting it won't have an effect.
Work your way through the inexpensive suspects starting at the least expensive. First, the cable, because the cables that come with external hard drives are built down to a price and can be a common failure. Next, the socket. Avoid all the intermediate steps (hubs, monitor, dock, the front panel of a desktop tower) and go right into the computer itself. Then another computer altogether, if you have an additional one available. A desktop drive powered from the mains (e.g. a LaCie d2 or 2big, a Western Digital My Book) gets an additional suspicion. When there is no indication of activity (no lights, no spinning, no noise), the small AC/DC adapter will fail more frequently than the disk drive it powers.
On Windows, the truth about what is connected will be found in Disk Management, where you can access it via a right click on Start. If a drive is shown in Disk Management, yet cannot be seen in File Explorer, then all it probably needs is a new drive letter assigned to it. Re-assigning a drive letter is harmless; you need to look for a disk with the status of being RAW or unallocated, or Disk Management asking you if you want to initialise this disk. When a disk loses its index to the entire disk, the files are almost always still sitting behind it, and if you initialise the disk, the indexes Windows wants to create will overwrite the indexes that data recovery uses to rebuild your files. Therefore, when Windows says you should initialise, say no, and keep saying no.
If you have a Mac, start by opening Disk Utility. Then go to "View" in Disk Utility and click "Show All Devices". It is very common for volumes to be greyed out below other devices; they are often still perfectly recoverable. There are two buttons in Disk Utility that you should treat with care. The "Erase" button will erase your disk and do exactly as the name implies. If a disk begins to make an unusual noise and you decide to run First Aid on it, you would be putting a lot of strain on the tired mechanics at the absolute worst time possible. Also, if your drive was formatted for Windows, it won't mount properly on your Mac, and vice versa: an Apple formatted drive is completely useless to Windows. A surprising amount of dead drives just need to move to another desk.
LaCie kit gets worked far harder than what the average person uses their kit for. It is sold to professionals including photographers, editors, designers and surveyors. Seagate, the company behind LaCie, has owned it since 2012. So in most cases, when you purchase a LaCie kit, the actual mechanism that drives the disk is a Seagate product wrapped in either aluminium or rubber armour. This is important because the armour and the mechanism can fail independently of each other. Most commonly when we get a call about a LaCie issue it is not a problem with the actual disk but rather a problem with the bridge board that converts a user's USB-C or Thunderbolt port into a language the disk can understand. A light on the unit, faint spinning of the motor, no information appears on the user's computer, and regardless of how many different cables are used there simply won't be communication. If bench equipment is connected directly to the disk (past the bridge) it will read the disk as if the enclosure had never existed.
When thinking about your data's safety, there is a larger principle at play here: an enclosure is never going to be the same as a hard drive, but sometimes they can't be separated at the kitchen table. With some of the Rugged series and most of the new WD portable drives, all data stored inside these enclosures is encrypted by the electronic circuitry within the enclosure itself. Therefore when you remove the internal hard drive from its enclosure and plug it into another computer without the enclosure (naked), it will read as nonsense everywhere, because the encryption keys were contained in the board you probably threw away. This is an excellent reason to send entire units instead of taking them apart yourself; you should also stop unplugging and replugging devices. A device that requires five attempts this week and fifteen next week to show up is not slow or being obstinate. It is working to a schedule, and each time it mounts successfully brings it closer to the last time. Your time would be better spent making a copy of what you can still reach than trying to figure out why something doesn't work.
Norfolk adds an element worth naming. The salt laden air found along the coast, and the slow dampness in a flint cottage or old boat shed, can both damage the contact points and electronic parts on boards over many years, causing the eventual failure to show itself as a drive which will not turn on at all instead of one that clicks. Although this seems like it would be terrible, it is actually good news for the pictures, because corrosion damages electronic parts, not magnetism. Therefore most times you will find the pictures still intact behind a board that has quietly disintegrated. It is board work rather than a lost cause.
Draw your line somewhere in this list: an unusual noise, especially after a fall; a RAW disk containing something that you would be sad about if lost; a drive that is detected less often as the weeks pass; or a piece of software that has run all through the night producing nothing that opens. Once you have crossed that line, the most straightforward thing to do is fairly dull. Take the bare drive from your laptop or PC; with a single external drive, send everything including the cable and the power supply. Pack it tight enough that nothing moves, get a quote over the telephone or with our free online diagnostic, and post it tracked and fully insured to the bench. Within 2 working days from when it arrives, you will be told what was wrong with it, given a reasonable description of what should come back, and a single written figure that you either accept or decline. There is no collection service and never has been; one parcel and you are done with it.
If it makes a noise, it gets no more attempts. There are a number of noises a hard drive can produce while running, and none of them get any better with usage; the heads that are unable to "read" the surface of the disk your files were recorded on cut into those surfaces as they run. A single unplug, left alone, has recovered more data than every data recovery program ever developed.
Free diagnostic inside 2 working days of arrival and a fixed quote; on logical faults you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or ring the freephone now.