External Hard Drive Failure

Status
Not open for further replies.
J

Jayc

i (N) monsters
Joined
Dec 7, 2008
Messages
244
Reaction score
0
I was using a very new Western Digital 1TB external hard drive when I accidentally dropped it. The fall was not very high (about the height of an average guy's knee) and occured when the drive was idle but connected to the computer and was powered on.

The first thing that happened was I got a message saying that there was a write failure that could have been caused by hardware problems and Windows could not save everything on it. When I tried to view some images with Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, a few first appeared, then the rest failed to show up. While I was attempting to use the drive, the drive light began to flash rapidly for a long time and I began to get multiple messages about a write failure. I panicked when I couldn't view the images and tried to reload the My Computer window, but the drive was no longer there. The light had stopped flashing by then but was still on.

I cut the power from the hard drive when it became apparent that it would not show up on My Computer. That was two hours ago and I daren't go back and try to see if it works now, because I'm pretty sure that it was a headcrash that caused the failure.

Now I need to know, what is the probability of data recovery, how much can I expect to get back, how much the recovery will cost and if it could be another issue entirely. I have less than 10gb (lol) of data in the drive, it being new and all, so I'm kind of hopeful that most, if not all of the data can be recovered.

Long story short:
-Dropped a WD 1TB external hard drive, short fall.
-Tried to use it briefly. No longer appears on My Computer, drive light is still on.
-Haven't touched it since.
-Recovery chances, cost and extent of recovery?

also, I'm probably going to switch to solid-state drives after this fiasco. I'm a goddamned moron for being so fucking greedy, having bought a conventional hard drive because the cost per gb was so amazingly cheap that solid-states actually looked like they came from the 1990s.
 
Last edited:
This might not work as well for this situation but it's worth a shot if you basically have nothing to lose. Try putting the hard drive in the freezer for about an hour and then plug it in and try accessing your data, if it happens to work by any chance, quickly evacuate all data off the drive as fast as you can. If it stops working again, try putting it back into the freezer for another hour and try again. This method usually only works for undamaged but failing hard drives. It's possible that the arm mechanism which moves across the platters to read/write data to the drive is damaged. But try that and see if it works.
 
!Tommy said:
This might not work as well for this situation but it's worth a shot if you basically have nothing to lose. Try putting the hard drive in the freezer for about an hour and then plug it in and try accessing your data, if it happens to work by any chance, quickly evacuate all data off the drive as fast as you can. If it stops working again, try putting it back into the freezer for another hour and try again. This method usually only works for undamaged but failing hard drives. It's possible that the arm mechanism which moves across the platters to read/write data to the drive is damaged. But try that and see if it works.
Click to expand...

Hmm... Interesting solution. Do you know the Science behind it, Tommy as I an rather intrigued by this? :p
 
No, people. This only works for certain cases (i.e. not for this problem!). When you drop it, the head touches the disk and scratches it. I'm afraid you can't fix this yourself. Take it to Geek Squad.
 
Hope for the best really.

Two weeks ago I was in the middle of an extreme project which was heavy on memory storage. While unpacking my external I dropped the case about 1-2 feet off the floor. I plugged it in and I couldn't get the drive to read on my computer for nearly half an hour. All I could do was keep plugging and re-plugging the firewire cable (or usb cable if that's what you're using) to see if that would jumpstart a read. As you could imagine, after an incident like that I was scared sh**less, but none the less, if I lost everything then and there I just accepted there was nothing I could do.

You can keep trying and hope something wasn't permanently dislodged on the platters. Since it was on, there's a greater chance of damage, but you can still hope for the best. I was really lucky my disk kept working after that, even if it seemed to go into a coma for about half an hour.

I haven't done it yet, but as a precaution, I'm probably going to need to back up everything soon since the HD is really a backup itself, so loosing it for me would be devastating. It's an old 250GB, I think it's time for an upgrade.
 
Don't freeze it. Geek Squad should do the trick.
 
@!Tommy - Thanks, but I don't think I'm going to take the risk with DIY.

@Rayne - I've been really afraid of powering it back up again since that could be the chance for the drive to screw itself up some more. Frankly, I was shocked that the drive couldn't handle such a minor fall - once, I bounced my laptop off the bed and onto the floor and it was perfectly fine.

@Internet & immewnity - Thanks. Thing is, I'm figuring out if it's worth the money getting the data off, but I have no clue how much it'll cost and whether I can actually get anything back.
 
its thousands of dollars to get data off that drive since it requires a trip to a special room where they take out the platters out of your drive and put in a working drive to get the data off of there if its with in 30 days depending on store policy where you purchased it take it back to the store or talk to WD to see what they can do for you
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom