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Nightmare - External hard drive crashes to floor

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HaRuMaN:

--- Quote from: saint on February 19, 2010, 10:24:00 am ---Small, relatively cheap, and getting bigger all the time.

--- End quote ---

That's what she said!  Wait... wot?

Havok:
Saint's got it right - optical media is too volatile. Best to keep your data on multiple devices in multiple places. I'm a little skeptical on how long jump drives would hold their data however. I personally have two mirrored 1TB drives where all my pictures and crap resides.

RTS - sent you a PM...

saint:
Do you have those elsewhere as well Havok? Mirror will protect you from a drive failure, but not something happening to the volume or disaster in that machine, house fire, etc...

I'm uncertain as to the longevity of jump drives myself. Eggs in multiple baskets for sure!

Havok:
That's the thing - I have them both in my home office. They're external for easy access, but you're right - I probably should periodically grab an image of the drive and store it offsite in case of home disaster. I like the idea of "borrowing" space on my work computer, I think I'll be using that hard drive on my laptop a little more fully now...

 ;)

MonMotha:
Was the drive on when it fell?  If so, it's probably toast.  If not, it probably survived, but the little board that's hooked up to it to do the USB or whatever side of things may have gotten loose or damaged.  If it's doing a "click", "click", "click" thing with a regular interval after spinning up, then it's almost certainly gone beyond any recovery you can attempt.  Generally that means that the firmware can't find its position for the armature.  Cause is usually a "head crash" or a bad position/limit sensor.

The thing to do is yank the drive out of the enclosure and hook it up to a PC directly.  If it at least shows up in the BIOS as present, you've got a good start.  You can then attempt various recovery methods on it such as spinrite.  Even just using a Linux live CD can sometimes let you see things Windows/DOS will choke on.  Probably a good idea to keep everything mounted read-only if you do get any access, just in case.  If you do get access, you may want to image the drive to another drive or file then attempt more complicated recovery "offline".

If you can't get any of that to work, you have a couple last ditch options.  These options are mutually exclusive since the cheap option tends to destroy the drive entirely if it doesn't work, rendering the expensive option impossible.

As a cheap option, you can chuck the drive in a freezer overnight then attempt software based recovery methods again.  Sometimes the temperature change is enough to let the drive find all its alignment stuff and work *for a while*.  If it does work, copy off everything you can as fast as you can.  You generally only get one shot.  Only do this if the data is not worth spending the money for professional hardware recovery.

As an expensive but more reliable option, call up OnTrack or a similar company.  If there's data to be recovered from that drive, they'll get it.  Expect a bill in the upper 3 to mid 4 figures.  Some complicated recovery processes may even hit lower 5 figures.  Don't attempt to freeze the drive then send it to OnTrack when that doesn't work.  That generally just costs you more money or results in them being unable to recover anything.

Whatever you do, do NOT attempt to open the drive.  That will generally just kill it.  Tolerances on hard drives are so tight that a speck of dust can destroy them.

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