Sons Hitachi hard drive fell off draw and not makes clicking sound and seems broken

Notmyrealname

£500 gets you 20GB of data recovered at a proper company that removes the platters and not some backstreet place that just uses software which usually makes the matter 10 times worse.

To explain what has happened in terms "that parents can understand"...

Think of the hard drive as a record player. The drive has discs like a vinyl record and an arm like the record player which reads the data on the discs. On the end of the arm is a coil, similar to a needle on a record player, which hovers above the disc with a gap a fraction the thickness of a human hair. When you drop a drive unless the drive is "parked" so the arm is retained in a park position the same as putting the arm back on the record player and locking it in place with a clip, it does the equivalent of scratching the record and the arm is knocked out of joint.

Jaxt

Thanks for all your thoughts on it , looks like recovery at a may not be an option for the amount of data that's on it sounds like it could cost a fortune which we haven't got .Waiting to hear from him to deliver the bad news .

olly300

John_Gray wrote: »

And there was me thinking that one of the functions of parents was to try to educate their children in the important things in life...! (However bolshie they might be.)

When their parents say it, it tends to go in one ear and come out the other even if it's repeated to them.

If a grand parent, other relative or close family friend repeats it, they actually take it in.

WhiteChristmas

robmar0se wrote: »

(doing this wold invalidate any warranty of course).

The warranty isn't worth toffee after its been dropped.

What are the symptoms of the failure, apart from the sound?

If it isn't being recognised, the first thing to do is remove the drive from the case and try a new USB caddy (about a tenner from eBay) or fit it directly to a desktop.

When this happened to me, I managed to rescue all the stuff I hadn't backed up one file at a time (trying more resulted in the computer hanging). A lengthy process and a lesson learnt.

Jaxt

Just given him the low down on what's happened he says he's tried turning on and said it beeps but not recognised by the pc at all no error message at all just nothing.I am gutted for him but told him to never ever be put in that position again he definitely needs a back up in cyberspace or something.anyone know anything about iCloud?

Nilrem

Cyberspace (internet) based backups are very time consuming and potentially expensive for the sort of amount of data you seem to talking about (you're paying someone to keep a copy).

What I do, is make a backup to one of my secondary internal drives, and a backup to an external drive.
For stuff that is really important I also keep copies on DVDR and possibly usb stick.

The important thing with isn't so much the backup itself, but that you maintain at least two copies (why the external drive is only a backup for the data on the machine, not the only copy of it).

I had to go through my backups earlier as I found I was missing some emails that I needed to check from a few years back, fortunately I was able to locate a DVD copy (what I use for longer term storage), with it on.

agrinnall

Having done this myself and lost everything that was on the drive I now have a drive that has made an attempt at providing some physical protection with a rubberised case (it's a Storejet) and I back that up to another hard drive, and also copy my most imprtant data onto several USB drives as well.

ChiefGrasscutter

Me too....
USB external drive permenantly connected to computer.
Computer's hard drive re-imaged to external drive on a monthly basis.
Data files etc also separately copied/refreshed to external hard drive on a weekly basis or more frequently if important work being done or changes being made.

...AND external drive also copied over to a second external hard drive which is only connected for the purpose of and duration of doing the copy/backup. Second drive kept normally in a totally different place.

Important working files also backed up to USB flash drive while being worked on a daily or sub daily basis.