External Hard Drive Took A Spill

[rockgremlin]

So, I recently purchased a 4 terrabyte external hard drive and dumped all of my photos (hikes, birthdays, holidays, family reunions, etc) on it from the last 10 years. It dropped on the floor and now my computer won't recognize it when I hook it into the USB port. I hear you can send it off to have it recovered professionally...for about $3,000 bucks. Any other ideas?

[moab mark]

You related to Swallow?

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

[Canyonater]

Do you not still have the original files on the drive where you copied them from? Is this drive not your backup?!?

[cchoc]

Was the drive on (spinning) when dropped? If so probably little hope, if not maybe just a loose connection.

[BruteForce]

Stick it in the freezer for a few hours..

[DOSS]

^ what brute said.. stick it in the freezer and be ready to immediately start pulling files off of it when you plug it in.. potentially even leave it in the freezer with cables snaking out while you pull the data off.... otherwise you are going to be looking at sending it off to someone and pay way too much to save the data..

[rockgremlin]

What does freezing the drive do? Sounds like a myth.

[DOSS]

What does freezing the drive do? Sounds like a myth.

Freezing causes the metal disks in your HDD to shrink ever so slightly so if the reason it isn't reading is due to a misalignment it can begin reading it again.... it is not a 100% thing but it works often enough that it is worth a shot

[Sombeech]

From what I gather, the computer just isn't recognizing it. Maybe when it was initialized, it was in a format other than NTFS?

When you plug it in, do you hear/ feel it spinning? I'm thinking this is a format issue, the freezer method might help if it's a stuck needle.

So first piece of crucial info, is the drive spinning, and does the computer make the noise as you plug it in like it recognizes it, but nothing ever comes up?

Do this:

1. Connect it to your machine, and any power if applicable
2. Right Click on Computer, go to Manage
3. Click Disk Management
4. In the bottom half of that box, scroll through the disks your computer sees and see if there's one with roughly the same storage as your device. It might even be called "Disk 5" or something like that, without an assigned drive letter.
5. If so, right click on it and go Properties if you can, take some screenshots and post up so we can see what kind of format it is.
6. DO NOT FORMAT DO NOT FORMAT

From this info we can see if a simple program like "Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Professional" can help, or maybe "EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard".
I've had luck with both of these.

[rockgremlin]

I ran the disk management and it didn't recognize the external hard drive. If you pick up the drive, it's warm to the touch and you can hear and feel things clicking around in there - which is normal, that's what it did when it was "healthy." When I hook it up to the computer, the computer stutters and acts like it wants to recognize it, but it never does. I haven't tried the freezer method yet.


And yes it was running when it was dropped. I hear that's the kiss of death with hard drives. :( If it comes down to it, I'd almost be willing to pony up a bucket of cash to have a professional recover the data -- there was invaluable photos and videos from the birth of our children, school plays, soccer games, football games, etc, etc, etc on there.

[Sombeech]

Ah, I missed the part where it was dropped while running.

Try those two programs I mentioned. If there's any hope at all for your hard drive, one of them will be able to recover it. Just FYI, I believe they are on torrent.

[Sombeech]

What these expensive places will do, is manually take out the individual disks (platters) and put them in another hard drive with a functioning needle and such. It's an exact process, they can't touch the disks in the wrong place, etc... and then they have to build the hard drive again to run it.

[cchoc]

Where did you copy the files from? It may be possible to retrieve them from those locations if they haven't been written over too much.

[Bluff-Canyoneer]

That's a tough situation. I hope you are able to recover them.

If you do recover them, create a Google Picasa account and upload everything there. I did it so that even if my house burns down, I still have all my pictures.

[DesertDuke]

If not for the part about it seeming physically disabled I would have recommended that you take it in to the local camera shop that you trust. They usually have experience saving photo files, but this sounds like a mechanical issue. We have a great geek-shop here in Idaho Falls and I'm sure St G has some nerd corner there that you could take it to. I'm sure this comment doesn't really help, but just saying I would try taking it locally before mailing it off to the unknown. For something this important I would even drive it down to Las Vegas. Its been too long since I lived in Vegas to give you a specific contact but I can check if you need me to.

Speaking of comments that don't help I can't help but touch on what you have undoubtedly thought about 200 times since dropping that: This is the very scenario I live in fear of. I have duplicate xternals here and once a year I back up on one that I send to my Mom and have her keep at her house. Seldom are all 3 synched and I'm sure I will loose something anyway. I store some on my smugmug account but it is not a good way to store mass quantities of RAW and MP4 files. I dont think the cloud methods are really the best for storing mega RAW and mp4 files. So I dont have a good, efficient recommendation for when you do get these back. At least you can be pretty certain that the files are there and you will likely get them back eventually. Plenty of people get in these situations where the files are truly lost.

Good luck

[DiscGo]

In a best case scenario the problem is with your enclosure and not the drive. You can remove the drive from the enclosure and plug it into your computer (with the power off) and power it back on and see if it recognizes it.

Just a heads up if the same problem exists then there is no guarantee that they will recover the data for the high prices.

P.S. The hard-drive in the freezer trick has worked at least 20 times for me but not in a scenario like this. The freezer trick has worked with the drive wasn't showing up at all, or not spinning. Even then the drive usually only last for about 20 or 30 minutes.



If you can get me the drive, I'm as likely as anyone else to be able to recover your data for you without having to pay through the nose to try and recover it.

[Iceaxe]

DiscGo is the man!

Tap'n on my Galaxy G3