Busted(?) External Hard Drive

Hi,

I need help with what might be a busted hard drive. It's a 250GB 3.5" IDE drive that I keep most of my files on (I have a laptop with unsatisfactory storage space). Yesterday it was on and being used and I dropped it from a height of about a foot and a half but kept working. Later, I unplugged it to move it into another room and when I tried to use it, it turned on and started spinning, clicked a few times, and then continued to spin but was not recognized as a drive. The little new hardware noise sounded, but I couldn't access the drive and the device manager could see a drive was connected but couldn't retrieve any information about it. I then moved it into another computer I own, a desktop, connected directly through IDE as a slave drive to my main drive. Bios recognized the drive and could get information about it, but when I booted up the desktop windows couldn't access it and device manager didn't even see that a second drive is connected. Does anyone know what might be wrong and if or how it could be fixed? I've heard about freezing drives, but that would, at best, be a temporary thing to get all essential data off, right?

Thanks, I really appreciate anything on this. I would really hurt from losing the data on the drive (but would also hurt from shelling out $200+ for professional retrieval).

you sounds pretty screwed.

Can you boot to a dos prompt and see the drive from there?

I can't.

And how can I be so screwed when the disk is spinning and when it kept working after I dropped it?

Well just because it is spinning doesn't mean the platter isn't damaged or isn't spinning off axis. If it was actually doing I/O at the time you dropped it chances are pretty good you scraped the platter with the R/W head. If you corrupted the file index it might have appeared to be ok on the computer it was on but when you reconnected it and the OS tries to read the file index from scratch (pun not necessarily intended) it might be getting errors preventing it from properly being recognized.

That's kind of a worst case scenario but you've done the obvious already of trying it on several different computers without success including hooking it up directly as a slave device.

I scanned the entire drive with a couple of data recovery programs I found. They recognized it as a physical drive, but couldn't find logistical drives (I think those are the right words) on it. Would that suggest more than a scratch on the file index?

Also, I'll be revealing my ignorance about the structure of hard drives, but is there any chance that the file index is located somewhere other than where the rest of the data is housed, such that I could save the actual data by swapping parts around between identical drives?

The drives are sealed for a reason, you try to pop one open and just randomly replace parts, your never going to get your data back. This is why professional data recovery from HDs costs a LOT!!

It's vacuum inside so when you open it... becomes unusable. Unless you want to pay more than what the HDD costs you for professional data recovery.

Here is the link.

http://www.acsdatabackup.com/Hard_Drive_Recovery.html

Thirty years ago, there was a poster, in nearly every data center, showing the relative size of the flying height of a disk head, a finger print smudge, a fine dust particle, and a human hair. The flying height was tiny compared to any of them.

Modern disks are much smaller and have far tighter tolerances.

There is zero chance you can open one outside a clean room and have anything left. And typical clean room recovery vendors charge $5000 to look at your disk.

You have just learned the reality of why backups are needed.