Help please bounced my external hard drive

dipsy

Yikes

Caught my foot on one of the leads, own stupid fault the lead was trailing....

anyway it is making an awful noise and computer doesn't register it as connected to pc.....

Not so bothered about the h/d as recovering the pictures of my kids off it....

anybody got any suggestions??

ta x

isofa

It's either the fan (it if has one, unlikely), or the HD itself, especially if it took a bad hit whilst running.

If it is the HD, best thing you can do, is open the case and replace the drive with another, it's probably an internal IDE one, but might be SATA so worth checking.

Little_John

I wouldnt put any money on it being the fan.

You have screwed the drive. your have a few options, send it away for data recovery, they will remove the platters and put them in a working drive read the contents and back it up.

you can try doing it yourself, get the drive out of the caddy and buy an identical drive, take it apart in a dust free environment and assemble the platters in to the new drive. the likley hood is that the drop just slammed the read/write heads on the platters and will have damaged those sections of the disk, the motor has proberbly gone also due to the shock.

you could try the freezer trick, stick it in the freezer for an hour and try the drive again, freezing causes components to contract and open up allowing disks to spin etc it has worked for me once or twice but you only have a short time to get the stuff off the drive (till it warms up)