PLEASE HELP!! Hard Drive Broken? Click of death?

[marcusw3]

Okay I am in the last couple weeks of my term in school. I have all my term projects and papers on this laptop drive.

What happened?........ I was leaving class, went to close my laptop and when I closed it, the laptop slipped from my hands and dropped 3 inches to the desk top surface.

When I got home I tried opening a program and nothing. Tried opening Task Manager, nothing. I pulled the drive and plugged it into another laptop and it does not detect it. You do hear the media spinning and the arm clicking. Click, click, click.......

How do I fix this? Would there be a service that is affordable to fix this? Could a person buy the identical drive online and switch out the plate or the head/arm from the new drive?

PLEASE HELP ME!!! I AM IN DIRE NEED!!!

Thank you people!

 

[tomatthe]

Most likely you would need to send this drive off to have the data pulled by professionals. I'm not sure what you would consider affordable, but this will probably start in the $500 range and move up from there.

I have heard several people speak positively of

http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/

I have no experience with them myself though.

"Could a person buy the identical drive online and switch out the plate or the head/arm from the new drive? " I have seen people mention this pretty often, but have rarely seen any positive results from it, but that's not to say it isn't worth trying.

You could take the drive to local repair centers, but I highly doubt any of them will be able to recover the data based on how you are describing the drives condition.

You might also want to search the forums and see what others have tried as this is pretty much 50% of the post on the storage section.

 

[bobusboy]

Try getting a live CD of linux (ubuntu or knoppix are both easy enough to use) and see if you can't access your hard drive and copy the files to an external USB drive / HDD.

I've done this before, but my computer would still boot but then it would start clicking and die.

 

[pnorman]

WD has a list of data recovery partners at http://support.wdc.com/recovery/index.asp?wdc_lang=en

I've never used any of them, but prices I've heard start at $500.

Seagate advices that if the drive is making any clicking, buzzing or scraping sounds to power it off and not attempt anything else.

Unless you happen to have a clean room, switching out mechanical parts is not an option.

Backups are a lot cheaper than recovery.

 

[Totempole]

The "freezer fix" suggested by HeckKardashian has been known to work, but I would only consider it as a last resort. If $500 to recover the data is out of your price range, I would probably try the "freezer fix" before physically opening the hard drive.

That being said, the FIRST thing I would try is to put it into an 2.5" external enclosure and connect it to another computer to see if you can recover any data.
It'll be frustrating, since you might only recover 40MB the first time, then you'll have to disconnect it for a while then reconnect it and try again.