Dropped hard drive - is it dead??

ellay864

OH managed to knock his external hard drive today so it dropped from a desk onto the floor...a fall of about 3ft onto a carpet (albeit not a thick soft one).
It's now making a bit of a noise when he turns it on like it's trying to run but not getting anywhere.
He doesnt want to risk taking the case off and doing any damage so will take it to a local place tomorrow who've helped us in the past, but I wondered if anybody has any done anything like this before.
Was it possible to repair? At what sort of price? If not repair, did you manage to retrieve the data from it?
He has loads of music files (has his own disco business) and had been doing some re-filing and not all of them are backed up

John_Gray

He's not likely to cause any damage if he opens the case up carefully. If a hard disk is broken, it's broken. It's always possible that a connector has become detached in the fall. But you might be talking £hundreds for a specialist firm to recover data from it if it's dead...

Motto: back up to different media and multiple times.

fwor

Was the drive powered on when he dropped it?

If not, there's a good chance that it will be Ok, as all modern HDD's auto-park the heads when the power is turned off.

If it was running there's a good chance it will be badly damaged - though even then it may be possible to get some of the data back. My BIL did something similar - though not quite so far a drop - and we got everything he wanted back simply with a chkdsk repair.

leemoss

You cant generally repair a hard disk, its sometimes possible to swap controller boards with one from a working (same model) hard drive but in this situation its more likely to be internal damage, especially if it was switched on.
As John Gray said, recovery is almost always possible, however the costs can be VERY high depending on the type of recovery needed. Its possible to remove the platters and have data recovered from them, this would only be worth it if the data was very very important.
I always keep at least 2 copies of my data now after a very lucky escape a few months back when a dodgy RAID configuration deleted 500gb of photos/music, which fortunately I managed to recover.
If its not reading properly, theres usually very little you can do it home with a damaged hard drive.