Beeping Noise And Can't Access External Hard Drive After it Dropped How Do I Recover?

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Aug 5, 2005
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Hey guys,

I had an invasion of raccoons that broke through the ceiling, one racoon went into my bed droom where I had to lock it into my room to prevent it from invading the whole house.

I have my PC's and External Hard Drives in my bed room. The Racoon was in my room for atleast a day and a half and it knocked several Seagate Backup Plus external hard drives off my desk.

It's about a 5 ft fall from the top of the desk. Most of the drives landed on a cushion of wires but 1 or 2 of them landed on my wooden floor.

All of the external hard drives are showing good in Crystal Disk Info but my 4tb Seagate Backup Plus is beeping and I can't access the drive. I have important files on there. How do I recover the files?

Also should I be concerned about my other drives?

Any help is greatly appreciated
 
wow, that whole raccoon situation is just weird....sorry about your luck.

your best bet is to actually take the hard drive out of the enclosure and connect it directly to another computer...but if it's the actual drive beeping...due to head crash or something, different brands actually made weird sounds or musical notes kind of beeping, this would indicate mechanical failure of the drive and you'd probably need to send the drive to an actual data recovery company.

otherwise I use testdisk, if the drive is readable by a computer, it can recover partition tables, formatted drives, etc.

look into some type of online storage as well, and maybe don't keep fragile hard drives on a desk where they can fall, next time wild animals invade your house.
 
Holy crap, what a freak accident leading to a hard drive problem. My condolences!

I've never heard of a HDD beeping--was this an off-the-shelf external drive? If so, have you looked up the user manual to determine if there are specific error codes associated with various beeps?
 
Thanks for the help.

How do I take the hard drive out of the enclosure? Would doing this worsen the damage if I was going to bring it into a Data Recovery Company? What are good Data Recovery Company's? Is Seagate's Data Recovery Service any good?
 
Sorry but I am curious why you left the raccoon in the room for a day and a half? Why not just close up as much of the house as possible, put on some heavy clothing and get a broom and get that thing out of the house?
 
Should I be concerned about my other hard drives that dropped?

The Exterminator didn't think it was a good idea to let it out of my room. We would be worried about our small dog and It may have caused damage to the house if they tried to catch it.
 
Should I be concerned about my other hard drives that dropped?

I would play it safe if it's important data and if you have some cash to spare and if you think it's worth to spare that cash just to be safe with the important data.

Else, a year ago I've dropped a bunch of old 1TB drives from 3-4 years back and I didn't care to replace them at that time, even now they are still running and now used as my data backup pool.
 
Why not use this link and go to the Seagate forums?

It took me all of 45 seconds to Google the problem and search their forums for beeping problems.

Good Luck!
 
Should I be concerned about my other hard drives that dropped?

The Exterminator didn't think it was a good idea to let it out of my room. We would be worried about our small dog and It may have caused damage to the house if they tried to catch it.

Condolences! That sucks big-time.

But I still don't understand why the raccoon stayed in there so long. Are you in a rural area where the only available exterminator was a day and a half away? How come animal control couldn't come sooner?

And how was the 'coon eventually apprehended/released?
 
The exterminator arrived the night they invaded the house. Both raccoons were trapped in separate rooms. The raccoons broke through the ceiling in one of the rooms. Before I had time to realize what was going on one of the raccoons escaped the room and went into my bedroom where I closed the door.

If I tried letting it out of my bed room it wouldn't be easy to catch and it could've hid anywhere (I desperately wanted to let it out of my room but it was risky). We were also worried about our safety and the dog. The Exterminator put a trap in my room and we had to wait for it to go in it but it never did.

2 days later we found out that the raccoon left my room by breaking through the Air conditioner side panel which is how it escaped. We never caught the raccoon, it left on it's own. We removed the air conditioner in my room to make sure that it won't come back in from outside. The other raccoon was trapped in the room where it came in from.

The raccoon in the room where they broke through eventually went back through the ceiling it came in from. We still have to keep the door close in the room with the broken ceiling just incase it decides to comes back in and until we have the ceiling and roof repaired and all holes patched.
 
The exterminator arrived the night they invaded the house. Both raccoons were trapped in separate rooms. The raccoons broke through the ceiling in one of the rooms. Before I had time to realize what was going on one of the raccoons escaped the room and went into my bedroom where I closed the door.

If I tried letting it out of my bed room it wouldn't be easy to catch and it could've hid anywhere (I desperately wanted to let it out of my room but it was risky). We were also worried about our safety and the dog. The Exterminator put a trap in my room and we had to wait for it to go in it but it never did.

2 days later we found out that the raccoon left my room by breaking through the Air conditioner side panel which is how it escaped. We never caught the raccoon, it left on it's own. We removed the air conditioner in my room to make sure that it won't come back in from outside. The other raccoon was trapped in the room where it came in from.

The raccoon in the room where they broke through eventually went back through the ceiling it came in from. We still have to keep the door close in the room with the broken ceiling just incase it decides to comes back in and until we have the ceiling and roof repaired and all holes patched.

Good grief, what a nightmare! I sure hope there's an insurance company somewhere that'll be shouldering the load in this for you guys, and with a helpful and friendly smile.

I never really understood what dangerous, vicious, and cunning animals raccoons are until the Kevin-Rose-tomahawks-angry-'coon-down-stairs fiasco made me brush up on my raccoon-speak through extensive research. I can only guess this is why the exterminator wasn't able to take a more "offensive" approach in the situation, like pushing into the room, approaching the coon, and pole-roping/lassoing it, rather than waiting for it to trigger the trap (which in my unprofessional opinion, given coons' intelligence, I'd guess would be unlikely to happen in this situation).

Hope all goes well in the repair, and I sure hope you're able to recover the data off that drive! I can't imagine the luck in such happening, and there's not much worse than losing a drive of precious data.
 
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While I've never had a need for a recovery service I'd probably try the Seagate service.

I'm sure they're very experienced with their own units and I saw $1500 mentioned on the link I sent you which sounds reasonable.

But do yourself a favor and never buy a prebuilt external again. Roll-yur-own for better reliability.

Good Luck!
 
Thanks.

I will be sending the drive to Seagate.

Question. Could dropping the drives have corrupted my files?
 
Harddrives failures come in a few different flavors. Here are a three you should hope for, and a one you should not...

The first and most common is a logic board (controller) failure. This is the easiest to recover because the platters, arm, and read heads are all in working condition. Connect to an external controller system and the drive will work perfectly again, making recovery trivial.

The second failure that you should hope for is a locked arm, as the platters should be entirely fine and fully readable if this has happened. They can either find a way to unlock the arm or move the platters to a recovery system that will read them directly. Sadly though, this is probably the rarest failure of all, so don't count on this one.

The third you should hope for is a spindle failure. Basically the platters won't spin, so no data can be read. Again, they can just move the platters to a recovery system and read them directly, and no data should be lost. This lies between the two above in frequency.

The one you don't want is a head crash. In the case of a head crash one or more read heads, which are ridiculously small and sensitive, hit the platter(s) and are destroyed. This makes them unable to read the drive, and damages the platters themselves. If this happens you will lose data, and it is just a matter of how much. The platters can be moved to a recovery system and read, but it takes much longer to read them, making this the most expensive recovery of them all. Also in this situation it is pretty likely the file table will be corrupt so you won't get file or folder names on some or all of your data. This includes file extensions, so figuring out which files are the ones you are looking for may be a very challenging process unless they are all the same file type on that drive.
 
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Thanks for the info!

One of my external hard drives is showing caution in Crystal Disk Info and HD Tune and showing yellow marks next to 2 sector count attributes. Does this mean I have corrupted files? Was this caused from the drop? I will be getting a replacement drive and will be transferring my files off of the drive.

My PC froze today which it never did in a few years. Could the problem external hard drive have caused my PC to freeze? I'm keeping the external hard drive powered off for now.

I'm running Memtest but so far all tests have passed with no errors.
 
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