#External hard drive recovery full#

If you’re absolutely sure that your hard drive won’t boot at all, you can remove it from its external enclosure - taking care to properly ground yourself before touching it - and try to hook it up to a desktop computer. It’s more likely that the drive has sustained physical damage, and it’s simply unable to boot as a result. It’s possible (if unlikely) that the electronic component of your hard drive was damaged. The drive doesn’t seem to turn on at all. To put it simply: If you’re hearing any sort of unusual sounds from a dropped external hard drive, turn it off immediately. It could mean that the read/write heads are in direct contact with the platters, which is obviously bad news. The drive “whirrs.” A whirring sound can also indicate a spindle or head failure.

Unplug the drive immediately and contact a data recovery professional. It’s possible that the read/write heads are in contact with the platters, and they could remove the magnetic material that stores your data. If you’re hearing a persistent clicking sound, the drive’s heads are having trouble finding your data.Īgain, this is a serious sign of a physical hard drive failure. The drive “clicks.” This can occur when the hard drive’s actuator arm hits a limiter, which prevents them from going too far in one direction. An engineer will need to repair or replace the spindle in order to copy the data off of the drive. If you hear a beep, we strongly recommend turning the drive off. That’s a problem, since hard drives need to maintain a certain amount of speed in order to keep their read/write heads from coming into contact with their platters (the part of the drive that stores your data). Essentially, the spindle is “locked up,” so it’s not able to run at its normal speed. This can occur due to electronic issues, but it’s more commonly associated with a spindle failure. The hard drive’s electronics aren’t able to provide enough power to the spindle to spin the platters. The drive “beeps.” A beeping sound usually comes from the spindle motor hub. In that case, you probably encountered one of the following scenarios: With that said, if you’re reading this article, you probably didn’t do that - you tried to start the drive, at which point you realized that your data was inaccessible.

#External hard drive recovery full#

Get it to a data recovery company and explain the situation they’ll be able to evaluate the drive without risking platter damage, ensuring that you’ll be able to get a full recovery of the contents.

If the drive contains absolutely essential data, the best practice is to leave it powered off. You’ve dropped your external hard drive, and you’re worried that it might not work anymore.