holy shit external hard drive death help!

Depending on how comfortable you are in doing this, you could always crack open the case and reseed the ribbon cable and power connectors to the drive. It could be (hopefully) something as simple as that. Then at the next opportunity, buy a second drive as a backup.

Good luck

Depending on the brand, design and your skills (or someone else’s skills), you could dismantle the drive and check 1) if the impact has simply dislodged something that you can put back in place in the power supply circuits 2) if you can remove the drive from its casing and put it in another one to see if that works. Be gentle and don’t throw away your drive in disgust. There are companies that will retreive data but it’s very expensive.

oh thank you thank you thank you. i feel a bit better simply knowing there is a possiblity of saving info. not so worried about getting it working here but have some important photos on there that i uh….have not backed up elsewhere. yes, ass ass ass. lesson. learned. any recommendations for a company tried and true? where perhaps i could mail it in? in london, new york, boston? i have peeps i trust there.

I would try reseeding the connections and trying another external case before I would even dream of sending the drive in. Talking thousands of dollars.

mine died last week so i feel your pain tanya lucky for me i had another back up.

stick your HD in a air tight plastic bag then put it in the freezer for a hour this will help to free up all parts and might let it work for a few hours , just enough time to get your work off it. crazy idea i know but this is what the IT wizard at my work said to do as a last ditch go, i never tried this so cant swear that it works.

The harddrive in my Mac crashed and the Mac repair center retrieved all data from it for around 120 dollars. Perhaps they can help..?

Hi Tanya. Don’t freeze your disk. I am more ass than you because i tried all the things and made all worst with my 250 Gb disk. My only one, ouch. So avoid touch your disk. If the led comes on so is not a simple problem of power cord. In general the cases are easy of disamble, give it a look to check if any is disconected or broken as said Brian but remember, don’t touch the disk, don’t put it in the freezer or another strange thing. Hopefully maybe is only broken the case circuits. Be patient and don’t hurry because in hot mind ones can make a lot of mistakes. I learned that. Good luck

I agree, Herman. Unless you absolutely need the files immediately, the chances of doing more damage are astronomical. Simply powering it up can make a head crash worse, and my best guess is that’s what you have.

You really need to bring it to a professional. Pack it up, when you get home, get it to a data recovery/hard drive specialist. Tech Superpowers, here in Boston, for example, will do a data recovery like this for $250… no charge if they don’t get anything, and they can then escalate it to someone like Drivesavers.

thank you guys for your input! sincerely.

Tanya, that’s the revenge of the Bavarian Beer God for not coming here. Hope you are well and safe…

ok i have to tell you this story.

a student of mine is a bike messenger and called me to tell me that his macbook pro makes great body armor, but doesnt work too good as a computer after being bent around his butt by a car. (he got hit on his bike. hit and run, no less) so the thing was a total loss, and even the hard drive was bent and wouldn’t spin up.

there was nothing to lose, and he did have his data, just had a few things not backed up.

i took the drive and, using incredibly precise adjustments (read: bending the sukka back to what looked like straight with my bare hands) we plugged the thing in. it spun up, and we pulled 100GB off it. it’s still working.

…but im a perfessional. don’t try this at home.

Tanya, So did you get things going? What did you do?

yo. im not reading all of this and am in rush… but… please… DONT TOUCH THAT FUCKER. IF you care about the data don’t freeze it, dont reconnect it.. (no offense to other opinions – im just going to be the voice of conservative-save-your-fucking-data!) put it aside DEFINITELY dont turn it on, bad, bad. put it aside. drivesavers.com if you really care. they don’t charge unless they recover. but there’s a million of those guys. just dont mess with it. i blew 500 gb with impatience…