Hard Drive dropped, not working

Hi all,

I dropped my 320GB Passport WD external hard drive from about 2-3 foot high
from my table on the carpet. Floor is not hard. It was running when it fall.
And afterwards I tried to access it for the first time after it had fallen, its working fine.
I am able to see all the data in my hard drive, there is no anykind of noice.
So I ignored it, But when i tried to access it for the second time, It had taken way long time to detect it,
My laptop detected it but there is no any kind of WD icon on it. It just detected as a drive with 290GB.
When i tried to opened it, its not opening, instead I got a pop-up saying, hard drive not formatted, Do you want to format it now? Yes or No.
But I am worried about the data in it. It contain nearly 100 GB of my personal useful Data, that I must need.
Can anybody suggest me in this situation. Also One more question is, Whether I can trust this hard drive in future.
I mean after formatting, does this works fine or it keeps giving me the same problem even if i take care of it.
There is no noise from the hard drive. When i touched it the drive is spinning. But there is a small opening of the case, i feel it didnt broke but just split by 2mm. some body please help me.

Thank you

 

Toasty drive...I don't think you'll be able to recover it. Drives, after being dropped, are almost certainly physically damaged inside.

 

^^^ That is especially the case when the disc took a hit while writing, like yours. That means the R/W heads were active over the platter, and either scratched the platter or damaged the R/W heads. Sorry, but it looks like the drive is destroyed.

Was the data backed up?

 

In all likelihood, the head is toast.

My old 80GB 2.5" in an external enclosure had dropped while writing. I could not get it to work again. I popped it open and found the needle on the head was damaged. If I really wanted the data, I would have had to find another drive that's the same and transplant the platters onto it. Doing it in a clean room or clean box would be best but most likely, I would have done without either.

Luckily for me, the data wasn't that important.

 

Dont give up, you have options. Take the harddrive out of the external enclosure and make sure that the drive is properly connected to the adaptor in the external enclosure. Since the drive is SATA, you can plug it into any desktop which has an available sata port and power cable. Just set the bios to boot the current drive and you should be able to access your harddrive from your external enclosure.

Let us know what happens, if you cant get the data off, you may have to call a data specialist, but that can be really expensive.

K-TRON

 

I had a WD External too and I dropped it only a few inches and it's gone =(
The R/W Head sits so close to the disks so it's easy to damage if you drop it. I know what worked for me was to sometimes turn the drive over and sometimes it would read. Most likely though you will need to take it to a recovery specialist. That of which is really expensive.