Damaged HDD, any way to retrieve my data?

[mega maniac]

Hello all,

I recently broke my external HDD, it had been overheating in its case so I had it loose, and during a reorganisation of my PC-area I accidentally stood on it whilst it was spinning, it made a god-awful "crunch" sound and I immediately thought "Oh damn, there goes all the data on that". However the HDD managed to continue to work despite this, I thought it best to take this blessing as a reason to back up all of the data stored on it.

During the backup (a simple drag and drop onto another HDD) it froze on a insignificant file, I left it for several hours, then tried killing the transfer before killing explorer all together. At this point the HDD disappeared from windows, and has been gone ever since.

I am assuming I damaged one of the sectors on the HDD when I stepped on it and when trying to read this sector the HDD froze up. My dilemma now is that I know that the data is still on there, I've seen it, but the HDD is not recognised by any program in windows or Mac (I run a dual boot) I have even run the Seagate disk utility from CD and it did not find it either.

So my question - Is there any way to get my system to recognise this disk, or do I have no hope short of a professional service that can try the platter in another disk?

HDD in question - Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 Gbytes

 

[Twoboxer]

Since your foot didn't contact anything but the disk, the damage is in that disk, and as you suspect, its done. Time for the professionals. Sorry.

 

[d1rtyju1c3]

You can try and see if you can get Recuva to read the HDD but if it is damaged then it probably wont read it, but its worth a try.