Dropped my External HD - Is it dead?

[svodka]

Hi all,

I dropped my external hard drive when I was moving it, fell probably 3-4 feet, and it was working fine right after, I plugged it in and everything worked normal, but just today I tried plugging it into 3 different computers and it did not get detected on any of them.

I plugged it in, turned it on, and it lit up, but was not detected, tried other usb ports, still nothing.

What can I do? It's 500GB's of my entire life on this thing, and I need the data from it! I was thinking of removing the case and taking out the circuit usb board, and plugging it into my computer as a normal SATA drive, will this work?

I don't really care about the drive itself..a hundred bucks will replace that, but the data on it is irreplaceable...

Any suggestions are appreciated

 

[RebateMonger]

It could be several things, although the most probable is a mechanical failure of the drive, which is the worst one.

Remove the drive and attempt to install it as a secondary drive on a working PC. From there, what to do next will depend on what you see.

As you've hopefully learned, you should never trust important data to a single copy. All storage media is subject to failure. External hard drives are especially vulnerable, both because they get dropped and because they overheat. As you noted, hard drives are cheap. Buy a second one and keep ongoing backups of anything important.

Also, if the data is both irreplaceable AND valuable, consider just sending it to a professional data recovery company. Anything that you do to the drive can potentially cause additional damage.

 

[svodka]

Thanks for the suggestion, I'm gonna try doing that and hopefully I can atleast get the data off of it.

I learned my lesson: never trust girls around technology! Oh and keep several backups..

 

[themisfit610]

Well, you can easily connect it to your PC. One of three things will happen

1) Drive no spin. Fail. Send to data recovery company and pay $$$
2) Drive spins, doesn't show up at all in Windows - i.e. not under the device manager. Fail. Send to data recover company and pay $$$
3) Drive spins, shows up in device manager, but doesn't mount. There's hope! Try Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS. This app has made me so much money doing exactly this kind of work!
4) Drive spins, shhows up in device manager and mounts. Win! Copy files to another location and RMA drive if you still have a warranty!

Actually, RMA in every case... after you pull data off the drive!

~MiSfit

 

[svodka]

Thanks misfit, I'll cross my fingers for either 3 or 4