dropped my external hard drive

bungaro79 · 15-12-2010 1:15pm #1

am so fecking annoyed with myself, dropped my iomega external hard drive off the couch and now when i tried to plug it in the laptop doesn't seem to recognise it :mad: theres no rattling sound off it and i opened it up and everything looks in place. can i just take it to the local pc repair guy or does this have to be sent back to iomega?? just hoping i can transfer all the stuff on it even if i can't get it fixed

akamossie · 15-12-2010 1:18pm

plug the HDD back into your computer, and check if the device manager and the disk management recognise the drive!!

bungaro79 · 15-12-2010 2:18pm

tried that but no luck

akamossie · 15-12-2010 2:27pm

it might not be good, but i'd say the chasis could be damaged but hard drive is fine, should be able to recover. ask iomega if they provide any data recovery before you open it, as it might void your warranty

bungaro79 · 15-12-2010 2:29pm

hopefully! cheers

Zapho · 15-12-2010 2:33pm

Eep! Feckin harddrives - Sometimes they can survive a 6 foot drop - sometimes they just fail by giving them a sour look!

Do you have a PC handy? If so, take the drive out of the external case and plug it internally into the PC, as you might have just damaged the USB controller on the external. Then you might be able to get your files off it. I can't guarantee that this will work though - hard drives are brittle things.

Iomega won't give your files back - and I'd be surprised if they'd even give you a free replacement considering the damage was caused by you. A local PC guy might be able to help - but I wouldn't hold my breath. Most PC repair places won't even touch a harddrive and those that do often haven't even heard of simple tools like chkdsk.exe and will charge you €80 for just plugging it in. You'd have to find someone that can do hard drive recovery - like myself for example (shamless plug, I know.....)

Zapho · 15-12-2010 2:34pm

akamossie wrote: »

it might not be good, but i'd say the chasis could be damaged but hard drive is fine, should be able to recover. ask iomega if they provide any data recovery before you open it, as it might void your warranty

Too late for that - he's already opened it

bungaro79 · 15-12-2010 7:13pm

hey zapho, don't think i did what you think i did, i only took off the chassis just to look inside but i didn't touch the actual hard drive! how do i go about doing what you said with plugging it into a pc??? have one at work i could try that on. tbh i;m not too worried if i've to replace it but don't want to lose everything i've saved on it!!

Zapho · 15-12-2010 7:34pm

bungaro79 wrote: »

hey zapho, don't think i did what you think i did, i only took off the chassis just to look inside but i didn't touch the actual hard drive! how do i go about doing what you said with plugging it into a pc??? have one at work i could try that on. tbh i;m not too worried if i've to replace it but don't want to lose everything i've saved on it!!

Easy, just take your hard drive out of the external case and find a PC that you can use to copy off the data. The drive is probably one of these two types: IDE or SATA. I've linked a guide for both below. You'll know by the look of the cable in teh guides as to which one you have.

For IDE:
http://www.helpwithpcs.com/upgrading/install-hard-drive.htm

For Sata:
http://computershopper.com/hard-drives-burners/howto/install-a-new-hard-drive-in-five-easy-steps

If you have an IDE drive - I usually unplug the cd-rom drive in the PC and connect that to the external hard drive which saves the hassle of worrying about master/slave configurations or messing with the bios.

Then see if you can access the drive when you power back on the PC. Just be gentle with the hard drive when you're removing it, don't want to damage it any further

dropped my external hard drive

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