External hard drive fell on floor and now doesn't work - help!

InaPickle

kwikbreaks wrote: »

No domestic quality drive is going to be guaranteed to survive a fall onto a hard surface. One that lays flat instead of standing up like the Freeagent is going to be less vulnerable to clumsiness though imo. If it is only a loose connector then there is no need to replace the drive.

Thanks kwikbreaks. Is there any way of telling whether ornot the connector is loose without taking the drive apart? I'm afriad that if I go that far and then try to patch it back up that I will have dislocated something else and just made the situation worse.

kwikbreaks

I'm afraid you're going to have to bite the bullet and open the case because even if it is only a loose connector (and the odds are that it is the hdd trashed) then unless you are Uri Geller you won't be able to fix it without being able to push the connector back on by hand anyway.

Once you've got the drive out you should be able to fit it inside a desktop computer (assuming you have a spare sata data and power cable - if not they're about £1 on eBay) and run some recovery software against it to see if you can salvage any data.

Before that though it is worth just reseating the drive in the internal connectors and retrying it if that is possible without a full reassembly (not obvious to me from the video).

InaPickle

kwikbreaks wrote: »

I'm afraid you're going to have to bite the bullet and open the case because even if it is only a loose connector (and the odds are that it is the hdd trashed) then unless you are Uri Geller you won't be able to fix it without being able to push the connector back on by hand anyway.

Once you've got the drive out you should be able to fit it inside a desktop computer (assuming you have a spare sata data and power cable - if not they're about £1 on eBay) and run some recovery software against it to see if you can salvage any data.

Before that though it is worth just reseating the drive in the internal connectors and retrying it if that is possible without a full reassembly (not obvious to me from the video).

Will give it a go at reseating it, but I don't have one of those sata cables, and I can't put it inside a desktop as the only computer I have is a laptop. Will it be possible to do the same thing externally? What recovery software would you recommend?

Sorry, but as you can tell I'm a techie newbie!

kwikbreaks

Well there are things you could use such as caddies but it isn't going to be worth your while buying one. With only a laptop and no other external drive caddy you are limited to just reseating all the connections and hoping it may work.

I've used this recovery program in the past on a disk that windows wouldn't even assign a drive letter to... http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download It will only recover from logical type errors though (corrupted partition table etc.) and if there is physical damage it wont recover data from damaged areas of the disk but may stop that damage preventing all access - it all comes down to what was busted.

InaPickle

kwikbreaks wrote: »

Well there are things you could use such as caddies but it isn't going to be worth your while buying one. With only a laptop and no other external drive caddy you are limited to just reseating all the connections and hoping it may work.

I've used this recovery program in the past on a disk that windows wouldn't even assign a drive letter to... http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download It will only recover from logical type errors though (corrupted partition table etc.) and if there is physical damage it wont recover data from damaged areas of the disk but may stop that damage preventing all access - it all comes down to what was busted.

I have a SATA dock you can slot a hard drive into, but I'm not sure I can use that with that hard drive from what I've seen on the video. Does that seem right to you (sorry, am trying to pack my mum off for a few days and it's whitter, whitter in my ear whle she gets ready so I can't concentrate 100%: it's worse than having kids! *Insert shruggy smiley*