my hard drive just hit the floor. . .

and when I start it it just makes this intermittent buzz, It is a nexstar 3 terrobyte HD, It fell maybe a foot and hit the floor. I have 5 years worth of image folders on it. I fear the worst. Can there be any recovery possibility? So, so bummed.

Do those come with a fan? I'd open it up, can hurt anything. But of course don't actually open the hard drive. How long have you had it? Do you only keep one copy of your stuff?

Don't try to turn it on anymore and be gentle with it. hard drive recovery is possible. They tend to cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands but are well worth it.

I've used a Canadian place called Datacent before and they did a good job with me, check them out!

http://datacent.com/

themadman wrote in post #11909652
Don't try to turn it on anymore and be gentle with it. hard drive recovery is possible. They tend to cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands but are well worth it.

I've used a Canadian place called Datacent before and they did a good job with me, check them out!

http://datacent.com/

That hard drive recovery is one costly thing.

macroshooter1970 wrote in post #11909662
That hard drive recovery is one costly thing.

Amen! It was going to cost me over $4000 to have a 250GB recovered. Fortunately, I know a guy who is in IT and has done it before. All it cost me was a steak dinner at Outback. He was able to recover 90% of the data.

asysin2leads wrote in post #11909688
Amen! It was going to cost me over $4000 to have a 250GB recovered. Fortunately, I know a guy who is in IT and has done it before. All it cost me was a steak dinner at Outback. He was able to recover 90% of the data.

4K+ thats crazy, you made out though.

I would try just buying an enclosure kit first. I had a WD that did the same thing. All the fall did was mess with the power connection. I changed out the enclosure and everything was fine. As long as none of the platters broke, recovery should be possible.

You don't mention if the drive is readable now, but I'm guessing that it is. Drives are pretty shock tollerante, even when running so going the route of sending it to a data recovery firm might be a bit premature.

From the sound of things I'm guessing that things are not backed up so the first thing you want to do is get things backed up as quickly as possible just in case the drive is really failing. Fist thing to do is go out and pick two new external drives. Plug in you suspected failing drive and see if you can copy all the files to one of the new drives. I'm guessing that you will be able to.Then do the same to the other new drive.

When you have two new copies put one in a safe place and every once in a while mirror the two.

As to the Nexstar, the noise is probably the heads resetting. It could indicate a problem but not necessarily. Once you have two fresh backups you might try re-formatting the Nexstar and see if things get better. If things are still the same, use the Nexstar for a while as a trash drive, keeping nothing important on the drive and see what it does. If things keep getting worse, like it's seeking all the time and copies get slow, or you start having read errors, replace the internal drive with a new one.

paulymaccc wrote in post #11909806
... As long as none of the platters broke, recovery should be possible.

The disks themselves are plated aluminum disks. You would have to hit it with a hammer or more to break the platter. Having the head scratch the oxide coating on the platter is more likely and will render the data unreadable as will a head failure. That's when you send it off to a fata recovery house.

Was it running when it fell?

I would unplug it, then open it up and check for mechanical problems like connectors unplugged, parts loose, etc. Once everything is in place, if it still doesn't play, try a different enclosure or mount the drive in a computer directly.

As you now know ... you should ALWAYS keep a backup ... of everything!

Sorry for your loss ... hope you are successful in recovery of your photos.

I tried to unplug and restart and the drive was not readable on my computer. I am hesitating to restart it for fear it might cause larger problems. Should I try starting it up and plugging it into my computer again?

Andrewq - I hope you don't mean that you have 3 Terabytes of data in one place - on one HDD - that isn't backed-up in any way...?

I'm not familiar with the Nexstar brand of HDD - I use housings with fans and put std PC HDDs in them.

But as Macroshooter says - you should be able to open the case. I was a Windows tech for many years, and I've not seen a situation where a PC or XHD housing was dropped less than a couple of feet, where the HDD itself was destroyed. Other parts of the PC, or the XHD housing and internal connectors, yes...

So, being very care that you don't slip with tools, and cause further damage, open the housing. If it has an end fan, or slow-run sidemount fan, either could have been dislodged. If a fan is jammed, can't rotate, that could be causing the "buzz".

Disconnect the fan and carefully try the drive again. If no luck, on the "connections" end of the HDD, there's a mounting strip with an IDE or Sata connector, and a power connection. Check that both are inserted into the HDD firmly, and try again.

If still no joy, the electronics in the XHD housing might have failed. Unplug those connectors from the HDD, and remove the HDD from the housing.

You can temporarily mount the HDD as a second hard-drive in a PC - so long as it has a spare set of suitable connections. Put the side back on the case before testing, so the PC has air circulation through the case.

Boot the system - I'm assuming Windows. If the drive is readable, it will come up as an extra drive-letter in Windows Explorer / MyComp, etc.

If you have that extra drive-letter, you can access the drive by double-clicking. From there, the C:-drive - and any other drive-letters it's partitioned to, will appear as a drop-down or tree-set in W.E.

You can open those, and copy the data off - initially to the PC's HDD - and from there to backup.

It's a reasonably good idea, when backing-up off PC - to have at least one level of redundancy. That is - if you're using an XHD as external backup - have 2 the same size - or, with a 3-Terabyte primary backup - 2 or 3 older/smaller XHDs that you do as secondary backup from the PC.

Or - if your system allows - open both the primary backup XHD, and one of the secondaries - and direct-transfer from primary to secondary. You can leave that running while you have a meal, etc.

Try those things, and if still no success, somebody is likely to think of something else.

It's actually rather unlikely the platters in that HDD are physically damaged, even if its electronics or motor are. So your data is almost certainly recoverable. But if you needed to take a failed HDD to a Recovery business, they'll either charge by the GB, or might give you a quote. Nether would be very cheap.

However - if your 5 years of irreplaceable data resides nowhere else - it could well be worth it....

Dave.

my brother-in-law works for Apple and I have called him. He is a computer genius and a wonderful problem solver when it comes to hardware. I don''t trust myself with delicate repair at all. I think I'm going to sit tight and see what he says.

Dave, I really appreciate the input and I am going to hang on to your post to pass on to my brother-in-law.

I recently moved everything to this hard drive and, have not backed up. Feeling really, really stupid right now.

asysin2leads wrote in post #11909688
Amen! It was going to cost me over $4000 to have a 250GB recovered. Fortunately, I know a guy who is in IT and has done it before. All it cost me was a steak dinner at Outback. He was able to recover 90% of the data.

Wow... mine only cost me around $450 for I think around 300GB plus a 1TB drive with the data on it. On the other hand, mine was not damaged by impact, just hardware failure on the hard drive.

Exwintech gave good advices.

That's what I would do: open the case up, check for noise and hook up the HDD to another dock or comp to test the hdd itself. Never try to copy or write anything on it.

Remember to destatic yourself first when doing that.

If the drive is still spinning, you could try to get some good data recovery data software to run on it, there's a good chance you could get every bit of data back.

I have been using DRW ( Data Recovery Wizard professional - EASEUS ) with great success to recover couple of 2 TB full of data WD HDD. It did take a long time like 40+, 60+ hours or more to do all the scanning, data rebuilding and saving data back.

Good luck.