Last night my 1.5TB FreeAgent Desk HDD took a fall to the floor thanks to the dog. Now when it's plugged in it makes a short buzz every few of seconds and will not it's spin up.

It has been knocked to the floor several times before and never missed a beat. I'm also pretty desperate as I've got years and 1.3TB worth of data on it. I'm not worried about the cost of the drive, so if I need to open it up to try something I'll do it to save the data.

Any Ideas?

This is beyond the capabilities of DIY. Not only is significant experience needed for this type of recovery, but a clean room will be required.

Custom tools will be needed. These type of tools are not even commercially available (for now) and are made in house by data recovery engineers.


I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but be prepared to pay a high price, as this is an extremely difficult recovery.

The platters will need to be moved, there is a tiny chance they wont, but that chance is less then 1% i would guess.

Fantastic.

I'm not sending it off to be recovered, so are there any things I could at least try myself?

You got the post / information of a real pro in this forum - why dont you believe it?


Either send this drive to a pro - locally or one out of this forum = only chance to get data back

or store it somewhere until you are able and willing to afford the data recovery costs

or loose your data = open your drive yourself, play socker with it or put it into the garbage


+++

Listen to the man, there is nothing you can do yourself for this particular case.

Sorry it's not what you wanted to hear, but it's a fact in this instance.

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Andrew, if you want any data back you really need to send it to a recovery specialist. And don't plug the disk in anymore.

When you dropped the disk, the bearing deformed and seized up. You are also looking at the possibility of head and platter damage from the impact.

If you keep trying to get it to come up, the motor will burn itself buzzing.

The recovery procedure is to build a new drive out of parts from your disk and other similar working disks. This is normally a big enough problem already, but Seagate took special measures during the design of their product to make this job very difficult. The people who can do it, practically built Seagate's disk factory in their own lab.

Why don't you put the disk in a safe place and ask around about prices before you give up?

Thanks for the advice guys.

I'll just have to call it a loss since I can't spend lots of money just to recover photos, movies, TV shows and music.

Guess my next drive will be a SSD.

LOL
U do not need SSD, U need BACKUP.
SSDs fail too, and are not much easier to recover than HDDs.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery