External Hard Drive Damage..Need Advice :(

Warder · #1 08-29-2007, 10:34 PM

My 15 year old sister was annoying the hell out of me all night, after telling her to knock it off a millions time I finally had had enough and got up and attempted to chase her down. She ran past my laptop, where my cords are plugged into the wall and knocked everything off the table onto the floor. Everything seems to be ok except for my 500gb external hard drive. The Power cord was damaged, but the unit is still receiving power. It connects to my laptop through USB 2.0 and when I plug everything in, my computer does not recognize it. I'm really unsure what to do, if there is anything that i can do. I probably had around $200,000 worth of date, projects, software on there. Is my only option as disk recovery? If so, is there any reputable company that isn't going to charge me well over $1000 to get it done?

Thanks for your help

kerowo · #2 08-29-2007, 10:42 PM

You have 200K worth of data and are quibbling about paying .5% to get it back?

You are going to be better off taking this to a professional recovery place right off the bat rather than risk totally ruining it if there is that much value on it. If it is worth that much you're pretty dumb not having it backed up somewhere.

Warder · #3 08-29-2007, 11:06 PM

Yeah I agree I'm really dumb not having it backed up. I was just about to order a second external drive for the sole purpose, but apparantly I didn't act soon enough. I realize that taking it to a professional is probably my only option... I'm just wondering where I can take it to get it done. Although I had that much value on there (rough estimate) I don't have much capital right now so I'd like to know what I can expect to pay here.

im_not_1337 · #4 08-30-2007, 03:04 AM

Im sort of confused by your original post. Was just the powercord damaged? If so, couldn't you just get a new power cord or a new same hard drive and replace the powercord. Im probably missing something here like the powercord is in the harddrive and not just plug in and out or something. But if you seriously do have 200k worth of data and this is not an exaggeration, i don't think there is any doubt in anyones mind you need to take this to a professional and pay what you need to to get that data back.

Anyway, give me some more details of exactly what happened and exactly what is damaged and ill probably be able to give you some better advice.

Also, no offense, but WHY IN THE HELL are you keeping $200k worth of data not backed up? Let alone sitting out for someone to swipe/destroy? If it was me, i would have multiple extremely reliable backups if it was worth this much.

SamIAm · #5 08-30-2007, 09:58 AM

Just for future reference, if anybody wants me to, you can pay me $2k to fly to your state, drive to your house, backup your data, and leave.

OP, I'm also a little curious about how broken your drive is. Have you tried it with a different USB port/computer/cable?

kerowo · #6 08-30-2007, 11:28 AM

It sounds like the drive failed the 3' drop onto carpet test. If you are lucky the heads weren't doing anything when it was swept off the table and nothing was lost once someone can get at the platters. Worst case, you were writting something and the heads plowed a nice furrow in the platters as the drive hit the deck.

SamIAm · #7 08-30-2007, 02:22 PM

[ QUOTE ]
If you are lucky the heads weren't doing anything when it was swept off the table and nothing was lost once someone can get at the platters.

[/ QUOTE ]
If you're REALLY lucky, you jammed port where the cable connects, and it's internally fine, just can't get the data to you.

But I'm with Kerowo's analysis. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] Go see a pro.

Warder · #8 08-30-2007, 02:44 PM

Well all I saw originally was that the power cord was damaged where the prongs plug into my HD. But I was able to manipulate it to where I could plug and it and power it up. When I tried to use the usb connection, my computer failed to recognize it. I've tried a different cord, different port, different computer (haven't tried a mac though) all unsuccessfully. I'm ordered a new external enclosure hoping that somehow it's just the connections that are part of the enclosure. It was not writing at the time, but fell a good 3 ft. on the the hard floor and backed into the wall. All the cords were ripped out of both ends. Luckily my laptop survived the crash. If this fix doesn' work the I plan on using a professional service. Thanks a lot for your replies.

BluffTHIS! · #9 08-30-2007, 03:46 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Just for future reference, if anybody wants me to, you can pay me $2k to fly to your state, drive to your house, backup your data, and leave.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not only am I willing to fly coach and do this for $500 cheaper than Sam, I will also throw in a belt whipping of the sister to deter future such damage.

I don't have a suggestion for the OP, but I am curious as to whether he and others here use an external drive for primary storage which isn't backed up on the main laptop drive. That is, is it just extra space? For myself I buy externals bigger than my main drive and save to that and then back up to the external.

kerowo · #10 08-30-2007, 04:05 PM

I mostly use the externals as back up, but I have some stuff on externals that I was going to move to a new machine and just ended up leaving it there because it was fairly static. Stuff I really don't want to lose, like my photography, is backed up in a couple of different places including archival gold DVD's that I keep at work.