# iomega External Drive not turning "on"



## jbass0435 (Sep 30, 2009)

I have a 1TB Iomega usb external hard drive with what looks like 500/500 seagate hd raid configuration. when i turn the power on the front led lights up but the fan and the drives don't spin up. There is only a clicking noise. I would like to test them mounted in my computer but I'm pretty sure I don't have the computer/room/cables necessary at hand. Hopefully i'm not looking at a serious hardware issue. I would like to try and avoid voiding any warranty i might have. 
thanks.


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## elcman (Oct 1, 2009)

I would definitely check into the warranty for the drive. The sound you're hearing seems like it is a power related issue. If nothing is spinning up but the LED is on, the power supply might not be delivering enough power to get things moving. (But enough to turn the light on.) If you're in warranty, I'm sure they'll have you replace the external power brick first.

Another consideration is that a power spike, surge, or some electrical system has created a "short" in the backplane powering the devices. In this case, it would be best to plug them in directly to your computer to check for data. If the RAID was mirrored, you should see a duplicate of the data in both places, but you might want to research how to pull that together. (I've never run into this situation myself...)

I know that most hard drive sellers won't pay for Data Recovery type services, I assume Iomega is no different. If you have precious information on there, you will want to try and connect it to a computer yourself. (Even if you are in warranty.)

Things you might need?
If the drives are SATA: You'll need a SATA cable and SATA power connector.
If the drives are IDE: A 40 pin ribbon cable and a regular molex power connector.

Most computers have both if they are recent enough. If not, it'll definitely have IDE. Even if you don't connect the data cables and but you can get the devices to spin up when you connect power, it's likely a problem with the backplane being fried.

You might need special software to decipher a RAID, but I think a mirror should be natively readable? Don't quote me on that.


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