Last night I was at a friend's house. I brought over my 400GB external hard drive so we could play good games that he didn't have. I had at least 80G of stuff on there. In the first 2 minutes of playing the game, he says, "I have to go shut the door." So he gets up, trips over the power cable of the hard drive, and sends the drive flying. It lands with an ugly thud, the game on the computer shuts down, and the drive turns off. With much worry, I quickly pick it up, and turn it back on. And it makes a noise that it normally does, but every so often, it would skip, and start over.

It won't even turn off the normal way, now. You can normally just hold down the power button, and it will turn off. No more of that.

My computer will not recognize it even if it is in the same USB port, and everything is plugged in.

This sucks. Every program I ever owned, every mp3 of my 5000+ songs, every picture, every movie, everything that has ever kept me on my computer is gone. Everything.

I think I'll just quit the internet.

Anyways, do you guys have any idea what may be wrong?

It's *possible* it's just a loose cable, open up the enclosure and check the cables are all attached to the drive.

If they are, i'd try connecting the drive to an IDE/SATA (depending on the drive) port in your computer itself. It will probably have more luck rescueing data from it like that.

Sounds like its got the click of death. There really isnt any way to fix that.


The data is gone. Let it go.

Yeah, HDs are pretty delicate mechanical devices with moving parts after all. However, if it doesn't look like it has been thrown across the room, you should be able to get a new one. A 400 GB external HD can't be that old and out of warranty, can it?

Good thing you have a black belt, at least; you should have no problems kicking this so called friend's *** who made you lose all that data (unless you had proper back-ups like wise men do).

Call the manufacturer. They may have a way of recovering the data (possibly).

Reminds me of this little story:
Rob Kolstad, CEO of BSDi, told a story at the 1996 Australian Unix User Group national conference:
A BSD OS customer had telephoned up.
(customer:) "My hard disc has just crashed, and I need to get the data off it."
"What does it say on page 4 of the manual?"
(reading) "If you do not have a good backup, you will be sorry."
"Do you have a backup?"
"No"
"Are you sorry?"
"Yes!"
"There you are, then. Works as advertised!"

I don't think there's much you can do. The manufacturer might replace the drive but I don't think their business is data recovery. That's expensive.

Unfortunately, it usually takes something like this for people to realize their data is not invincible. MP3s, movies, and programs can easily be replaced. Pictures, if you mean ones taken by you, should always be backed up, as well as any important work (school, job, etc).

For myself, I keep my school work in multiple locations. Programs are kept on the school's computer science server, on my laptop, two drives in my desktop, and I usually email them to myself at a gmail account. Everything else can be replaced, but I'm getting an external drive to backup stuff that I'd rather (things that would take a while to download again, etc) not lose soon. A good practice for external backups is to keep the drive unplugged when a backup is not in progress, this way if a virus or something wipes out everything you're still safe.

It'll also learn you to make sure cables and such aren't on the floor where people can trip over them and destroy these kinds of things.

I keep both my drives in my compuer case where they're nice and safe.

I have three drives in my computer. One of them contains a manual backup of all of my files. I also have a manual backup on my laptop and manual backups on DVD-Rs.

This is my fancy way of telling you how you're screwed.

The data on the platters is probably still intact. There are plenty of data recovery services that could get it back, but for a premium.

I've read that freezing a drive for a few hours can get rid of the click of death long enough to retreive the data. I guess it's the expansion from freezing or something. Google it.

I saw a thing on TechTV, before it changed and started sucking, that said if your hardrive ever dies, you can stick it in the freezer for a little while and fix it. When you pull it out of the freezer, you have a very small window of opportunity to take data off the drive before it burns out for good.

You might try looking that up.

This freezer thing...a friend mentioned it to me...do I only have one shot?

From what I've heard, yes. You only have one shot at it.

Reminds me of what happened to my brother, who took his HD back and forth from our house to a friend. One day, he was bringing it back, and dropped it on the cement floor of our garage. Pieces went flying everywhere, and he lost it all. EVERYTHING. Infact, some of those files were MINE too.

Dang...would getting 30 GB of stuff off there be impossible in that time frame?

Depends how you get it off I suppose.

What other ways are there? I was thinking of just dragging it off....

Which would cost thousands of dollars for a program you can get yourself for a scant hundred, if not less.

GetBackData for NTFS or FAT, depending on which filesystem it was formatted to. This program works AMAZINGLY well. I've used it multiple times over and over again and I've never been disappointed. It's similar to what those "data recovery agencies" use, but its cost is exponentially lower.

Trust me, if ever there was a way to get the data off it that would be it, I'm sure.

Uhm, aren't those programs for software errors? Like when you've accidently formated your drive?
But I guess they might work in this case, too, because they probably won't halt on errors and leave you with nothing.

Yes, Impi. From the sounds of it, the drive isn't even spinning properly. The data is probably still on the disk. So long as the head didn't crash and cut into the magnetic substrate after you tried to start it again.

All my non-replaceable data (documents, source code, etc.) is backed up on both my dad's computer and my brothers. If my PC were to get damaged, I'd lose all my ripped CDs, but I'd be able to re-rip them from my hardcopies- it'd just an awful hassle. Sorry for your own data loss