Since you have taken the disk apart it will now be useless as within the enclosure there could have been a vacuum or an inert gas. You will never be able to recover any data on the disk unless you go and pay for a professional data recovery organisation to read the platters. The price for a replacement 340GByte USB disk is about $25 which would give you a better product than your old disk. Mark -----Original Message----- From: H Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2020 4:47 PM To: centos at centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] External harddisk On 09/30/2020 05:40 AM, John Pierce wrote: > On Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 8:33 AM H <agents at meddatainc.com> wrote: > >> I have an old external harddisk, Toshiba 320 Gb, with a USB connector >> that >> I wanted to check for contents. It did not start up when connected and I >> could not hear the motor spinning. After leaving it in the freezer >> overnight the motor spins but it is not recognized by my computer. I >> disassembled it and could see that the head assembly rests outside the >> disk >> but when it is powered on, the head first moves to the center of the >> disk, >> then to the periphery and finally back to the resting position. This >> happens every few seconds and leaving it connected overnight changed >> nothing. >> > That repeated seeking suggests it's not passing its self test, and is > constantly retrying. It's probably searching for servo data on the > disks, > and not finding it. > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos I see. I have not searched for any low-level disk utility from Toshiba, the manufacturer of the disk. Do you think that might be worthwhile to hopefully fix this? _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS at centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos