Dropped computer and my hard drive is not reading

I have a lot of important pictures on there. And need to get them off of it. I took the cover off of it and the board is not broke. And when I semi shake it, I cannot hear it in pieces, so that is a good thing.

I tried having someone read it from a USB set up. But it's unreadable. The drive is running and sounds good. Just sadly unable to read it.

Basically my laptop fell from the couch. And was on. I thought everything was fine because I still saw icons on the screen. But once I started clicking on stuff, it locked up and froze. So I turned it off and then back on. It then said boot drive problem and go into bios. And then it said disk read error.

Sad thing is I was literally about to build me a new computer next week.

I live in Atlanta. Any idea of finding a great place who does this. How much I'm looking at spending. The percentage they'll be able to pull off my pictures.

It is a sata hard drive barracuda 1tb. There is roughly 400gb used on it.

Looked at some sites. Anywhere from 500-1000$ depending on what level.

I would say the highest level. But you don't hear anything broke. And it actually has a good running sound to it.

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Some things are backed up. Just not everything. And I don't copy my work that is edited. And I've been working on building my website, so I have 1000s of pictures edited

Do you have another PC available, yours or a friend's, that you can plug this drive into? If the drive isn't damaged you should be able to read data that resides on it.

Robert17 said:

Do you have another PC available, yours or a friend's, that you can plug this drive into? If the drive isn't damaged you should be able to read data that resides on it.

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mashburn said:

I tried having someone read it from a USB set up. But it's unreadable. The drive is running and sounds good. Just sadly unable to read it.

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If your laptop (and hard drive) fell while the system was up and running there's a chance that the read/write head on the drive may have dug into one of the drive's platters and scratched the surface making it unreadable. Or perhaps the read head itself was damaged in the fall.

A drive with this problem may or may not exhibit strange noises when the platters are spinning, depends on how bad the damage was.

The chances of whether or not data can be recovered from a drive damaged in this manner (dropped while running) vary depending upon how hard the impact was, whether the drive was being read from or written to at the time, and whether there was physical damage done to the inside of the drive. I've had to recover files from a drive that was in a dropped laptop once, about four or five years ago. In that case the owner was lucky that the drive was not too badly damaged and their personal and work files were able to be recovered.

Hi there.

Is the drive recognized in BIOS? If it is, then you can try to extract your pictures with Linux Live CD - just download/burn the ISO image to a CD or USB and change the boot order to the media you burned the Linux on. Once it loads, you could try and mount the drive (or if Linux can read it, it will mount by itself) and see if you can transfer the files from the external.

If it doesn't help, then it will be best to contact a data recovery company and see if your information can be retrieved from the drive, and keep in mind that the more you use the drive and try to repair it, the worse the damage and the extraction of files may become. Here's a link with some companies you can take a look at if you want:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=ocnAAg

Hope this helps and best of luck!

Mighty_Miro_WD said:

Hi there.

Is the drive recognized in BIOS? If it is, then you can try to extract your pictures with Linux Live CD - just download/burn the ISO image to a CD or USB and change the boot order to the media you burned the Linux on. Once it loads, you could try and mount the drive (or if Linux can read it, it will mount by itself) and see if you can transfer the files from the external.

If it doesn't help, then it will be best to contact a data recovery company and see if your information can be retrieved from the drive, and keep in mind that the more you use the drive and try to repair it, the worse the damage and the extraction of files may become. Here's a link with some companies you can take a look at if you want:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=ocnAAg

Hope this helps and best of luck!

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This +∞

All I saw was that you tried to use a USB dock type thing, correct? If you actually connect the drive via SATA to the secondary system, you may have better luck.

Robert17 said:

Do you have another PC available, yours or a friend's, that you can plug this drive into? If the drive isn't damaged you should be able to read data that resides on it.

Click to expand...

Yeah I tried. It didn't work

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Mighty_Miro_WD said:

Hi there.

Is the drive recognized in BIOS? If it is, then you can try to extract your pictures with Linux Live CD - just download/burn the ISO image to a CD or USB and change the boot order to the media you burned the Linux on. Once it loads, you could try and mount the drive (or if Linux can read it, it will mount by itself) and see if you can transfer the files from the external.

If it doesn't help, then it will be best to contact a data recovery company and see if your information can be retrieved from the drive, and keep in mind that the more you use the drive and try to repair it, the worse the damage and the extraction of files may become. Here's a link with some companies you can take a look at if you want:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=ocnAAg

Hope this helps and best of luck!

Click to expand...

Thanks. My wife did something were it found the drive. So maybe she can walk me thru the steps how she did it in bios..... But she had to turn things off and on. And it would not show up just turning the bios on.

I'm on vacation right now. And will try in a couple weeks when I get back.

Thanks

OK, keep us posted!