Accidentally Dropped my External HD, Now it Doesnt Work Anymore

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Starguard

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 28, 2003
Messages
332
A few months ago I went and bought a small Seagate Backup Plus Portable Device. I had it sitting on the top of my PC Tower and accidentally dropped it. Now when I plug it in, it beeps about 25 times in rapid succession, and from there does nothing more. I cant get a icon to show when I plug it in.

Is it Dead? :confused:
 
The drive may be fine and just the enclosure is busted. If you have important data on the drive, you can open the enclosure and see if the drive works in a different enclosure. Or just connect it straight to your motherboard.
 
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extide said:
It's probably toast.
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Sadly, what he said. Was it powered on when it was dropped?

If you don't have the data on it backed up, crack it open and try connecting the internal drive directly. Also the freezer tricks, etc. This will void any warranty, of course.
 
izx said:
Sadly, what he said. Was it powered on when it was dropped?

If you don't have the data on it backed up, crack it open and try connecting the internal drive directly. Also the freezer tricks, etc. This will void any warranty, of course.
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Ill give it the old freezer trick, but Im pretty sure you guys are right :(
 
beeping sound may be the motor trying to spin up, meaning the heads are stuck on the platter.
you can open up the drive and unstick the heads but do so at your own risk, and if it works, copy the data off the drive and don't use it for anything important anymore.
 
Starguard said:
Ill give it the old freezer trick, but Im pretty sure you guys are right :(
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Catastrophic drops usually result in the actuator arm (heads) "crashing" into the platters. If the drive was off when dropped, there's a chance they crashed into the parking area on the disk which contains no data. If you can free the arm by freezer, gentle taps, etc., hopefully it'll spin up and let you get data off of it.
 
I dropped a bare 5tb drive 2 weeks after I got it. It was only about 2 feet on to carpet. Felt crappy to feel like you just blew $140 for nothing. I've been using it in my media center for a couple months now and no issues. I got lucky.
 
Yea guys, I think she's a goner. I tried the freezer trick and got the same results. I tapped it a few times and plugged it back in. Now the beeping has gone away and I can hear it starting, but I don't get an Icon on my drive screen.

Oh well... Thanks anyways for all of the responses
 
Have you opened it up yet? The backup plus line uses standard sata drives. You will damage the enclosure but if the controller is causing problems your data may be intact.
 
munkle said:
I dropped a bare 5tb drive 2 weeks after I got it. It was only about 2 feet on to carpet. Felt crappy to feel like you just blew $140 for nothing. I've been using it in my media center for a couple months now and no issues. I got lucky.
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That's because it wasn't on so the drive heads were parked. Much less likely to cause damage like that. My cousin destroyed a hard drive by dropping an entire built pc less than a foot while it was on.
 
This. Take the drive out of the enclosure and try it before you give up. The drive may be just fine.
 
Shame that you went with Seagate. They are easily the most fragile drives.
 
Ocellaris said:
The drive may be fine and just the enclosure is busted. If you have important data on the drive, you can open the enclosure and see if the drive works in a different enclosure. Or just connect it straight to your motherboard.
Click to expand...

It's possible the interface part is what's broken, not the drive. I recently saved a friend's data by resoldering a micro USB port because it sheared off a WD external storage unit that has an encryption unit between the USB and internal drive (image through microscope before cleaning off the flux and a slightly more zoomed out one showing the board). Depending if the Seagate model encrypts or not, this step could be unnecessary - the drive itself worked fine, but all of its data was encrypted and needed access to the hardware-stored key (now, why WD used a surface mount micro USB for such an important piece of their hardware? *shrug*

So, first thing to do is take it out. If the drive is recognized but doesn't have partitions, DON'T ATTEMPT PARTITION REPAIR. Figure out what's wrong with the interface board, first - could save you a lot of headache if there's encryption preventing you from seeing the partition table.
 
Oh no Seagates are made of broken glass... :-( Pull the drive and plug it directly into a PC without the enclosure.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions. I had the same problem and these tips helped. You saved my "movie" collection!
 
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