External hard drive fried by static???

Many of these external hdd enclosures proberbly lack proper ESD protection. If the powersupply lacks earthground and the connection laptop-ext_hdd is just a thin wire via an usb/fw link then it just may not be sufficient to rid ESD.

You had a potential difference to the hdd enclosure. And the surge killed some or all electronics.

The quick remedy is to replace the usb/fw ATA controller to see if that helps. If not you got serious trouble.

(I would like to hear some good opinions on ESD & external hdds)

Yes, the same has hapened to one of my collegues.

Assuming 'doze you might be lucky and the only thing blown is the partition table, 'doze will not show what it cannot handle.

Yep.

No - all things PC are crap.

Yes.

Define "grounded properly". Then examine the grounding path from the point on the external drive where you touched it to a proper safety ground (the green wire in your house wiring, for instance).

ESD.

anymore.

Your 'external 120GB' drive is a USB connected device, I assume.

It's unlikely that a static event to the external accessible parts of this device would overstress the USB pins (which are inside a shielded cable/shrouded connector. You probably discharged to ground through the grounded cable, which wouldn't affect the signal wire pair at all. USB connections are heavily protected against static events (yeah, lightning can still fry things, but your standard finger-at-2000V is well within the normal EMI compatibility specifications).

If the drive doesn't work, check out your warranty.

First, though, unplug the drive's power and data, and reboot your computer. Then reconnect and test.

There are some power-supply designs that can shut down on a fault (usually they reset when power is disconnected for a few seconds), and there are filesystem operations that lock out access in such a way that a disk could disappear without any hardware problem.

Others have answered what happened. But, you may want to recover your data. If you have a warranty, you may see what they can do for you. If no warranty, open it up and see if it is a standard IDE drive inside. You should be able to connect this to your internal IDE cables and see the drive. If so, you are really lucky.

Otherwise, either the drives USB interface, the computer's USB interface, or both, may be popped. So, check the drive on another computer's USB and see if it works. If so, it is the computer's USB. Try something else in the computer's USB port, if it works, then the drive's USB is fried. Don't be "shocked" if both have gone bad.

Unless you provided a good ground to a metal-cased drive, it probably has a horrible ground, or no ground at all. If it has a plastic housing, that is likely to be as useless as having all the electronics out in the open.

Jon

This is about the fourth time i have heard of ESD zapping the case electronics and in the process left a mess on the file system to clean up. Replace the case (break it gently please) and use data recovery tools to rebuild the data on the disk drive.