Dropped 2'1/2 Hard Drive

[miljbee]

Dear all,

this morning, i have dropped my portable hd, and the shock has been heavy ...

when i plugged it in the usb2 port : strange noise and nothing ...

I was a bit disapointed ... i have tried some little shocks/shakes on the drive but it has not helped ...

since i have no experience in hard drive problem and haven't got any idea on how to repair it, i decided to open it, just to see !
once done, i found that the arm that holds the head was in the middle of the disk. i have pushed it slowly to place it out of the disk (plate ?). I quickly close this, plug it in the usb case ........... tada ............ it worked !!!!
i was very proud ! but E/S errors have come quickly .... no problem for the data, they are backup elsewhere. but the drive is quiet usefull for me and i do no want to buy another one.

I think that some part of the drive are deffective but some others are good. i spend a few time on the net to find advice/software, and found mhdd in UBCD (ultimate boot cd). I have had a quick look to the doc and to the faq and i started a scan on the drive. a few seconds later the screen was displaying red cross and other 'bad' symbols in the map ...
i cancelled the scan (it was very long) and typed erase.

a few seconds later, the soft hangs and explain me that the device is broken (catastrophic failure/error ...). I restarted mhdd with the switch to not use bios and retyped 'erase'.

the erase is running for more than 2 hours now, and it has performed about 10% of the work (oups). But i will be patient, and i will let him go to the end.
After that, i plan to do a scan + erase and a scan + remap.

What is your feeling about this little story ?

Will the drive be usable as in the past, but with a lot of bad sectors Or do you think i am loosing my time and i can throw the hard drive to the bin ?

Thanks for your avices !

[pepe]

Hi,

Good work as far as the recovery is concerned!
But I wouldn't spend a minute on the repairing this drive.
Once you opened it be happy with your data and do not expect to much of the drive.
(IMHO)

see ya,
pepe

[gurudev]

Right Pepe .............

[hddguru]

Right Pepe .............

And also the fact that you scraped the head across the platter probably caused your new media errors... Use it now as an ashtray or some new modern art thingy