Hard drive damaged from drop / impact
Summary and Symptoms
The drive or computer was dropped, knocked down, tipped over, punched, thrown, smashed, or had something fall on it, and now the data is completely inaccessible or too slow to be accessed and copied. Especially common with external drives, this is something we work on every day. Hard drives are extremely sensitive to any impact of vibration damage, especially when powered on.
The Situation
Whether the drive was just tipped over, or dropped 10 feet, hard drives are very sensitive to impact damage…much more sensitive than most of our customers realize. We’ve had thousands of drives come in over the years that were dropped when moving or transporting, fell when a cable was pulled, or that were bumped and knocked over by cats, dogs, birds, kids, and of course accidentally by the owners / users themselves. It’s very easy to do, and sometimes even just moving a drive from one place to another and setting it down can be too much impact for a sensitive drive to survive. (We recommend never moving an external drive that is plugged in and spinning. Instead, power a drive down and unplug it from the computer before moving it, and before you plug it in again make sure the drive is situated in a safe place and is stable. Then plug it in / power it on). In any case, the drive has been subjected to physical impact and no longer works, and often the drive is making clicking, ticking, or beeping noises that it never made before, (though this is not always the case).
The Solution
Any time a drive no longer works properly after physical trauma, it’s important to avoid or minimize regular amateur attempts and get your drive to data recovery professionals. If the internal read/write heads are bent or damaged, the last thing you want to do is continue to start the drive up which may cause more platter scratching and more damage. Often, dropped drives are badly damaged internally, but sometimes when we’re lucky, the damage is confined to only small areas and may not require the cleanroom work that these cases often require. The only way to know how bad the drive is and what needs to be done for successful recovery is to let us examine the drive in the lab so that we can determine how bad the situation is.