External drive fell on the floor, and now beeps once and isnt recognized...dead?

Deadjasper said:
Heads could be stuck. Tap it with a screwdriver while it's powered up and see if they break loose. You have nothing to lose at this point.
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Worth trying this before freezing it. I've had some luck with just a quick rotation to get a stuck spindle going too. Obviously, if you get it to spin up, pull the data asap, cause it's probably not going to work for long or spin up a second time.
 
pendragon1 said:
it sounds like the head is crashed. you could try the old freezer trick. put it in a anti-static bag and freeze it over night. hook it up and see if it will work and then quickly start grabbing data if it does.
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Just to add to this, I can share my variation of this.

OP, treat it as a destructive method.
In my case, this works for 30 minutes, maybe a bit longer, but the drive deteriorates as you're doing it. After a while it might become unresponsive permanently.

What I do is I chill the drive to close to 0 deg. C, maybe even freeze. After that, I take one of those cooler inserts (plastic container with chilled liquid) and place it on top of the hard drive (or, both top and bottom).
You can try placing a big wad of tissue paper underneath the electronics, so that the controller board doesn't just sit in a puddle of water. A thermometer is useful.

Windows might not be the best choice for recovery. I personally used Linux, because in my experience it's more forgiving to a drive popping in and out of existence.
I like to have `dmesg -w` open in a console window to be able to see in real-time when it disappears and reappears.
Imaging the drive in this state might produce a corrupted image.

In my case, it was actually slightly above 0 deg. C that was optimal - IIRC around 2-4 degrees.
 
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