Dropped Harddrive

busyliving

Hey all,

Hoping you can offer help here, my mate dropped his harddrive and now it won't work...I know that dropping a harddrive can do alot of damage

So when i plug it in and try to access it, i get this warning



Can anyone suggestion a potentail solution to access the information on it? Just looking to recover the photo's off it really

Cheers

bonzodog2

Doesn't sound good, but all may not be lost. It may be the enclosure rather than the disc inside that has been damaged, if you're lucky.

Does it show up in Disk Management (on XP, right click MyComputer,choose Manage) ?
Does the external drive show lights/make noise/does powersupply get warm ?

Assess how valuable the data is - a new enclosure is prob less than 20$ off ebay (is that Perth,WA or Perth,Scotland ?); you'll need to determine if the drive inside is 2.5" or 3.5" (generally, powered by USB lead or external PSU) and whether its IDE or SATA (check wiki/google for what the connectors look like, also all recent ones are SATA).

I think the 2.5" drives these days have an inbuilt drop-protection system, but I don't know how good it is.

Good Luck !

norbert64

Might be worth running Windows checkdisk on it?

Otherwise, you could try a Linux/Ubuntu live CD.
Boot from the CD, then try and open the HDD.
If you can get in and your files are still there, it probably just means the partition table is a bit scrambled and Windows can't properly view it.

Backup all your files using Linux and reformat the drive. :cool:

Antar Bolaeisk

What sort of sound does it make when it powers on, is it the usual whirr and hum of something spinning at high speed or is it clicking, grinding and chugging?

matt-dublin

you might be looking at having to get the ontrack software to recover any data from it.

if its making a clicking noise then she's gone, but ontrack can recover the data from it if necessary you can send it to them and they can restore from surface level

busyliving

It’s a portable hard drive.

Also the sound out of it when it’s attached to the computer seems like the normal hard drive sound.


It appears in My Computer as a drive, but when i right click on it...nothing happens it just freezes my windows explorer