My 1TB external hard drive took quite a hard knock from an explosion (no duff, I'm in Afghanistan). Laptop survived, but when I boot up the hard drive it spins up and beeps, but nothing more. Took it apart (dusty country but we do have clean rooms with overpressure filtered air), the arm moves to the centre of the drive, then the beep happens and it returns to the outer edge and repeats.
Not worried about data recovery, was using it for movies and TV shows while here and I have all the original discs back at home. But I would like to try to get it to function again if possible.
Any suggestions, ideas, theories and even maybe dirty jokes are welcome.
Thks!

Well, the heads are almost sure damaged, and probably platters have some damages as well.
Can you see if any of the heads are riped of the arms?

Anyway, to be honest, if the point is just to use it again, forget about that one and buy a new one, as it would much more expensive and time consuming to repair that one than to buy 5 new ones.

your profile says you are in canada why is it so ?

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RAID/Server Recovery

dmarques, the heads look pristine. It wasn't operating at the time so I assume the arm was parked.
chinopk, home is Canada, just visiting here.

Thing is that you'll probably spend more in buying the parts for it, than to buy a new 1 Tb drive.

But I have some of those in stock if you need

After reassembly, it's acting a bit different: no longer beeps, now spins up (sounds like it is, anyway) but doesn't seem to boot up entirely. Previously an led would show blue on startup, then turn red as it booted up, then back to blue once stable and running. Now it lights blue, flashes red momentarily then back to blue. Although spinning, doesn't appear to interface with the computer, no icon appears. Something in the startup process being interrupted?

I'm no longer at the location where the clean room is so I'm not about to crack the case again to see what the arm is doing.

dmarques, I imagine I'll soon be in the market for a 2TB with a firewire interface. Depends on where you ship to?