Anyway to save a dropped external HDD?

3WAYsplit

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 26, 2001
Messages
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I was visiting a friend earlier this week. He was planning to show me his new PC. But he ended up dropping his external HDD.

It feel a couple feet on to the floor. The HDD landed on the USB connector and bent it. He was able to bend it back into place. The HDD started up fine when he plugged it in. Fast forward to today, he tells me the HDD started clicking.
It is also freezing his Windows 10 system. When he unplugs it the computer goes back to normal.

Can He save this HDD?

Could he swap out the external enclosure for another? It looked like the USB connector took the most of the impact.

Is this drive shot?
 
No way anyone could tell you what is wrong until you try swapping enclosure/disk and try to at least see the SMART status.

Edit. I had one SG drive that was clicking for years and was 24/7. With no problems. But here if the clicking is new after the fall, yes, it's a bad sign.
 
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Yeah sorry, if dat shit has started clicking, time to get the data off the drive as soon as fucking possible and replace the drive.
 
clicking usually equals some sort of mechanical failure.. As others have said.. get the data off now, and move on.
 
Any chance to replace the external case so it works? Could he connect directly?

When it hit the USB cable connection took the brunt of the impact.
 
I have tried connecting the hard drive using a drive dock. Windows 10 can see the drive but says it's "RAW". How do I change it back without formating?
 
You can try some recovery software like GetDataBack.

There could be several reasons for the drive showing up as RAW. A couple are physical damage to the drive or the other enclosure was encrypted or translated the drive in some way. Some enclosures convert 512 byte physical sectors to show up to the OS as 4K native to allow for > 2.2TB drives to work on old OSs like XP that lack GPT partitions.
 
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I'm giving iBoysoft Data Recovery a try. My hard drive has over 300GB of information on it, they offer 1GB free retrieval But they allow me to select the files I want to recover, so I can choose the most important info.

The very least, I need to see the file names. This way I can get or find other copies.
 
Did the drive click when in the dock? Clicking might have been due to intermittent USB and or PS connections in the original enclosure. If you have a secondary computer, just connect straight to the SATA connections and see what you see. I wouldn't connect a suspect drive to my primary rig.
 
Did the drive click when in the dock? Clicking might have been due to intermittent USB and or PS connections in the original enclosure. If you have a secondary computer, just connect straight to the SATA connections and see what you see. I wouldn't connect a suspect drive to my primary rig.

There has been no clicking while in the dock.

The clicking only happened once in the original enclosure. That was only one time for less than two minutes. The clicking pattern was like this:
click............20 seconds goes by.........click............20 seconds goes by.........click............20 seconds goes by.........click............20 seconds goes by.........click............20 seconds goes by.........click............20 seconds goes by......... no more clicking.
The drive wasn't being accessed during that time.
 
No more clicking and a raw volume = toast. You may get lucky and recover "something". But that something might just be garbage or incomplete. Still worth a shot. Either way, when done, toss the drive and move on. Not reliable.
 
No more clicking and a raw volume = toast. You may get lucky and recover "something". But that something might just be garbage or incomplete. Still worth a shot. Either way, when done, toss the drive and move on. Not reliable.


Yep, it's toast. :( But I did manage to copy all the files for my friend using TestDisk. When I tried to format the drive, it just locked up my computer. I tried formatting using Win10 & Linux.


Thx, for the help.
 
totally sucks. =( Never like hearing that. At least you recovered "something". Hopefully it was useful.
 
You can double/tripple bag the hard drive in plastic (Suck as much air our as possible) and place it in the freezer overnight, then try and extract all the data from it. I have used this method to successfully retrieve data from multiple failed drives that I was unable to read from without freezing. Some drives required going back to the freezer multiple times. The worst was a coworker who had 10's of GB's of non-backed up family pictures on their laptop. I was able to get like 90% of the data from that drive, which was by far the worst I've dealt with.
 
Anytime you can recover most or all of the data from a dead or dying drive, count it as a win. BTW, 3.5" HD platters make good rescue mirrors for a bug out bag.
 
Cheap backup devices should be duplicated, I have two external hard drives that store the same backup data (which was helpful when I knocked one off of the desk and got the click of doom). And you should also have a remote backup service for the most irreplaceable data, a 100GB google drive account is $1.99/mo. Drag your friend out of the stone age.
 
You can double/tripple bag the hard drive in plastic (Suck as much air our as possible) and place it in the freezer overnight, then try and extract all the data from it. I have used this method to successfully retrieve data from multiple failed drives that I was unable to read from without freezing. Some drives required going back to the freezer multiple times. The worst was a coworker who had 10's of GB's of non-backed up family pictures on their laptop. I was able to get like 90% of the data from that drive, which was by far the worst I've dealt with.
My trick was a triple seal with a Food Saver vacuum sealer (sucked all the air out of the bag and heat seals it) then 8 hours in a ice chest full of dry ice (that little jewel was COLD, but I got most of the data off of it). YMMV.
 
My trick was a triple seal with a Food Saver vacuum sealer (sucked all the air out of the bag and heat seals it) then 8 hours in a ice chest full of dry ice (that little jewel was COLD, but I got most of the data off of it). YMMV.

I have seriously never thought about that, but last time I did this was before I bought a vacuum sealer. Will keep that in mind for personal use since I don't have time to do this for anyone else anymore.
 
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