Damaged hard drive; wondering if data is recoverable.

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ammon17

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Apr 5, 2014
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I recently dropped my external hard drive case, and it seems to have done damage to the hard drive it contained (a 2Tb WD 'Green'). Now, every time I trun on the extrnal hard drive, it says i have to format the hard drive before using it. I finally broke down and tried 'formatting it', and windows says the process failed and 'check to make sure it is not in read only mode'.

I have tried taking the hard drive out and putting it in other external cases, and even plugged it directly into multiple motherboards using a sata cable. No BIOS will register its existence! Yet, when in the external drive, it is noticed by computers after a minute or so delay.

Do you think I could send it in for data recovery? ...Or is it totally without hope?
 
Solution
F
The drive most likely has sustained head and/or media damage. The reason you can see the external enclosure is that your computer is detecting the USB-SATA bridge PCB inside the USB mass storage device, not the HDD behind the bridge.
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fzabkar

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Sep 22, 2010
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The drive most likely has sustained head and/or media damage. The reason you can see the external enclosure is that your computer is detecting the USB-SATA bridge PCB inside the USB mass storage device, not the HDD behind the bridge.
 
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ammon17

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Apr 5, 2014
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So if only the head, green circuit board, or sata/power connection points are damaged, I should be able to send it in for data recovery, right? It's only if the disks inside were damaged, that the data is irretrievable?
 
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ammon17

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Apr 5, 2014
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Hmm... I have heard of hard drive recovery services that charge no more than a couple hundred.

And what does the freezing do I wonder? Cause the internal data reading head(s) to move slower?

 
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ammon17

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Apr 5, 2014
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Hmm... I have heard of hard drive recovery services that charge no more than a couple hundred.

And what does the freezing do I wonder? Cause the internal data reading head(s) to move slower?
 
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ammon17

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Apr 5, 2014
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Well, I had another backup, but it lacks about 1% of this drive's data, (but that 1% took me about ten hours to acquire). Plus, I have no way of getting that data back, since, unlike a hard drive, I don't have such fragile read/write paths to my brain, or a perfect recall. The data is worth at most, only maybe 100 bucks to me, but it filled out a collection of mine nicely, and so has sentimental value.

If it had been, say... part of a story I had been working on, that would have been a whole different matter. ...Thank heavens for the cloud (OneDrive)!
 
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