Hello all.

I have an 8tb Western Digital Red drive that I stupidly dropped because I insisted on trying to hold my newborn while building a PC. It fell about 2 feet onto a hard floor. It was in a USB enclosure, but unfortunately that didn't pad it enough. I took it out of the enclosure and it still will not work. It sounds like it's trying to start up and then it turns off again. Over and over.

I am pretty certain I am screwed. However, I am sure I can re-download a lot of what was on there. Problem is, I have no idea what was on there since I have so many hard drives.

1) Is there a way in Windows to find out what file names were on the drive? I feel like there is somewhere that Windows keeps this information, because the program UltraSearch will sometimes give me results of files from hard drives that aren't connected to my computer. I have a feeling Windows Indexing must keep a list of file names somewhere, no? This would make it 1,000x easier for me to figure out what I lost so I can get everything back, as time-consuming as it will be. Way better than nothing.

2) Is it possible the head just got stuck and I can push the platter to move again? Windows wasn't even booted up at the time I dropped the drive; it was merely powered on. I saw a great guide online on opening a laptop drive to get the platter to move again, but it seems like 3.5" drives are way harder to open for some reason. I know I should send this to a lab if I really want the data back, but it's not worth that amount of money to me. It is however worth me attempting to retrieve, even if it only has a 10% chance or lower of working.

Any advice or info would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!

What's the exact model number? You should contact one of the recovery experts on here.

hi.
i think you are telling spinup and spin down. most time head damaged. according to your post i think it wouldn't be head stuck on platter. however can you upload the startup sound.
BTW you can't correct this issue without DR person support. don't open the platter side after waching you tube videos. that video are not real cases sometimes.

OK. With the type of possible damage I subjected this drive to, what should I expect to pay to have it fixed?

Here is a pic of the label:

https://i.imgur.com/mXDnice.jpg

probably still better than the other one would have been...

you won't have the drive fixed. Extracting the data is another matter, but that would be a few thousand in any normal currencies i think.
if it was just downloaded data, forget it and move on.
you will re-download as you need it.

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Impossible to repair, almost impossible to recover.

As Pepe says, a recovery would run into thousands on this model.

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PC Image Data Recovery
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If you can find someone to work on it, recovery would probably cost between $4,000 to $10,000. Unless you have something super-important on it, I'd chalk it up as loss and move on. Listen to what pepe and pcimage are saying.

With these types of drives, you should always run them in some kind of a RAID so you can swap out bad drives and swap in new ones.

First question of O.P. was : is it possible to get at least a list of the files which were in it, with standard Windows tools ?
To O.P. / “Hamburglar” : Do you remember at least a few file names ? With no particular place to look for, I would scan the entire system partition with WinHex, searching with specific enough keywords. If you don't remember at all what was in there, indeed, it's safe to say that it wasn't that important...


@pepe

What do you mean, if he had been trying to hold his PC while building a newborn ?



Damn... Just because of the capacity, or is it a particularly rare and/or tricky model ?
I have two 8TB drives, I make sure to always keep them synchronized. RAID may be more convenient, but it's less secure (does not protect from software failures / viruses).

It's Helium-filled drive
Nobody from Data Recovery world wants to touch these

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

Can someone help me get a file name list from my Windows search .EDB file?

Your best option is to try to find someone that have some experience in recovery with linux. You might get lucky.

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https://cslpc.ca/

Naive or stupid?

Whats so special about Linux?

Have you ever seen a Data Recovery PRO. tool in Linux? there is a reason for that

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Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

Actually linux is nice but since most people use MS OSes all the tools seem to be developed under MS. And this is because developers of dr tools wanna maximize their revenues by selling as much tool as possible so they develop for Win. They do not develop for the experienced users, in fact they prefer selling to newbies who will also buy training..
On the other hand linux has great flexibility, you can do virtually anything if you are experienced.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Am aware of all of this,,, probably you did not get my point of my question for him.

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Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

yup i understood that and Im portuguese too

you had luck i think the newborn is new technology and you couldnt download another copy...

of course, linux alone does not help in such situation, pointless to think about it.

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

phew.... this is too much... I'm out...

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Linux will not mount the drive
You can always load the drive (without mounting) after the bios.

Yes I did.

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https://cslpc.ca/

Exactly

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