So I've had this drive for a few years, it's served me faithfully. I have it plugged into a SATA/USB cable while I use it on my laptop, and last night, I knocked it off the bed and dropped it. The drop was no more than a foot off the ground, but let's be honest, harddrives are barely meant to move, much less collide sharply with another hard object.

Needless to say, the harddrive is currently kaputt. The drive makes a whirring sound, like a three-tone low-to-high sound as if that's an audible error message. Only reason I say that is because I know the number of beeps in a POST message can be an error. Moving forward, the drive makes this loud whirring sound four or five times, then my laptop recognizes that I've plugged in something. I can see the drive in my device manager, and see that it's plugged in via USB. The harddrive continues to make this sound another handful of times, then stops. No matter what the laptop says, I cannot see the harddrive in My Computer, much less open it or access anything on it.

I know enough about harddrives to know that once it hits something, like the ground, you either take it somewhere and get fixed, or buy a new one. But then, I don't know everything, hence why I'm writing you guys. This all said, what are my options? Is there anything I can do to the HDD (without erasing it)? Or should I just see about sending it somewhere to be fixed? I just checked and no, I'm not under warranty, so what does one do in such a situation?

The drive clearly has physical issues. The sounds you describe suggest to me that the spindle is unable to spin, this could be because the heads are knocked out of the park position and are stuck to the platters or the spindle is seized. In either case, you had better get the drive assessed by a professional data recovery lab first. If their price is too high and you decide that you want to take the fate of your data into your own hands, you can then consider opening the drive yourself. But, after you open it yourself, you increase the cost for a pro to recover your data and you will never know if you were the reason for making it worse, should a pro not be able to recover after you opened it.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Yeah, that's about what I expected, it hit the ground and the impact knocked something where it shouldn't be.

Well let me ask this open-ended question, just because I know you guys have posters from all over the world...where would I see about getting a hard drive repaired in Wiesbaden, Germany (leave me alone, parts of me still don't know how to function without a Best Buy in my life)?

EDIT: Forgot I live in the glorious age of Google. Will find a data recovery lab around here and let them fix it. It was only a 1' drop, like I said, so the damage shouldn't be too severe. Thanks for the help.

Yes, I think it might be just a stuck head that should be easy for a data recovery company to fix without too much problems unless something comes up.

Make sure you find a data recovery Lab and not a computer repair shop.

If I got your sound description correctly, then it's most likely indeed either a spindle jam or a stiction (heads may be broken at the same time).

If you are looking to send the drive somewhere because local services are expensive, we can help, our prices are lower than average European ones.

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