History

The hard drive fell out of a laptop onto a tiled floor. The drop was around 0.3 of a meter.

Symptoms

I have tested on a few laptops and the results are all the same,

On power up a mechanical clicking comes from the hard drive. When the BIOS gives up attempting to find a boot disk, the mechanical sound stops and the BIOS reports no HDD can be found.

Conclusion

I am no expert but I guess in all likelihood the problem is that the bearings in the spindle motor have dislodged. Of course it maybe the drop caused an alignment or head problem or even it has caused all three!

I also guess that nearly all the data is recoverable and an image can be taken but I stand to be corrected by you guys!

What I need

In short whilst 90% of the data is either non critical and/or backed up the other 10% matters to me so the ideal solution for me would be to find someone that can ghost the whole drive to another drive.


I list below some tech stuff.

Best

Loco


The HDD is a 16 head Hitachi 80GB Sata drive running at 5400RPM manufactured in Jan 2007.

I have a donor drive available.

I also have a Seagate 400GB Sata drive that would be my preferred option to image to.

If your drop has damaged the spindle motor and heads on this who do you plan on doing this work for you. This in all is not a DYI job for someone who does not know about how to move platters, deblock spindle motors, and head alignment. This can not be performed on your kitchen table or other places you are thinking of. If you care about the data only hope for you is a Pro who knows what he is doing on this one. He can save your data for you. Sorry but not a job for you on this one.

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Iorana Haraharaini

I'd guess heads/platter damage

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

"I am no expert but I guess in all likelihood the problem is that the bearings in the spindle motor have dislodged. Of course it maybe the drop caused an alignment or head problem or even it has caused all three!"

Manco per idea (= forget it).

You have head damage AND, as it is Hitachi, you have 99% platter damage.
This makes recovery possible but complicated (will require maybe MANY parts only for you) and maybe somehow limited.
And no, it's not a 10 EUR nor 100 EUR job. Much more.