My external hard drive is no longer responding. When plugged in I can hear it attempting to spin, making an 'EEP' noise, and then it stops spinning. I know the drive fell from a short height recently, which apparently was enough to cause this.

Is there any way to get this fixed without having to send it to data recovery? I just need it to work long enough to grab a few gigs off.

I hear throwing the drive in your freezer for a few hours might give you enough time to pull some data off. I've never actually tried and I imagine it could potentially ruin the drive permanently, but it could be worth a shot.

well since it's an external you could attempt removing the drive from the enclosure and testing it in a different enclosure to see if that might help

I had to do this with my external, but then again my failure wasn't because I dropped it. I would try this first before the freezer trick, you've got to be pretty careful to pull that off.

you just need to be careful and make it watertight so as not to pick up any condensation. it's not so difficult.

I had a similar problem with an external hard drive, I was able to access it but there was a lot of damaged files and the drive would lockup after a few minutes of browsing. I put it in a zip-lock bag and put it in my freezer overnight. It gave me at least 10 minutes to recover some of my data before it warmed up again.

I still have the thing in my closet. my music folder was a mine field of corrupt files, it got to be very tedious figuring out what was salvageable.

Did you buy an external case and put a hard drive in it or did you buy it as an external? At least pull the drive out and hook it in directly to the PC because I had something go wrong with a maxtor external while the seagate drive inside was just fine.

Yes please try this before attempting any freezer voodoo.

It's extremely possible that only the usb->sata circuitboard or connection was damaged.