Hi guys,
My Seagate 5Tb HDD took a nose dive from the bottom unit of my TV stand and landed on my foot. It roughly fell around 6-8" and was a pretty soft landing.
It is now totally f**ked with no light appearing and only slightly spins when attached to my PC.
My music & software catalogue cannot be accessed.
At the moment I feel as though I am going to be sick as I'm sure fellow musicians can feel my pain.
I have lost all my music projects and more and was hoping that someone my be able to point me in the direction of a HDD recovery company that is reasonably priced.

I know before anyone says it 'keep a backup,' but too expensive to have a spare 5Tb online storage on my wages!

Many thanks to anyone who might be able to help

Martin

 

I understand your pain
Before thinking about using these companies.
If it's not a mechanical problem (clicking Sounds), chances are you can fix it at the electronics, but just the time to recover your data, because you'll have to consider it unstable after that .

 

Awwww man I feel your pain. I'm currently sitting on a 3TB that has a clicking after a small fall. Forftunatly, 75% of this drive was used for backing up the backup and the other was all new material that I pretty much lost. I learned the hard way...back up the back ups. Good luck in recovery.

 

Was the HD in use when it fell down ? It happened to me with 500 GB drive years ago , the external HD was in use .Clicking after .No way
to recover ,( i did not want to go to a recovery company) .But i also dropped other HD's not in use , i could recover data .
Maybe take it out of the box or enclosure and try in a dock ,so you can be sure it is not the electronic part of box enclosure that is the problem .
Only thing that comes to mind , good luck

 

@bassboy303

This is the company that we have used in the past for ourselves and the one we recommend to our clients. I have used others in the past but this is my go to data rescue company. Some companies are cheaper but your data is priceless so do not opt for the cheap route.
https://www.securedatarecovery.com/services

 

I concur with @TonyG, I myself researched this after I inadvertently killed my data drive, a 500GB HGST by swapping the PC board with another drive. I used to do that all the time with older drives. New drives keep information on there that (sector maps) that only relates to that specific platter. If you try to swap cards, that information gets destroyed. SO I ended up with two bad drives afterwards. It's recoverable, but not by your typical end user or tech as you must have very specific hardware which is rather costly.
This set me back roughly a year, but in the end it was a good thing because I thought we were ready to release, but I still had much learning and work left to do. My current work is worlds above what was lost on that HDD.
Data recovery is expensive!
As others suggested, try removing the actual drive from the enclosure and connect it directly to a PC or uase one of these first to verify that the fault is in the drive and not the enclosure electronics:

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-USB3S2SAT3CB-Drive-Adapter-Cable/dp/B00HJZJI84

 

While online storage of that size may be too expensive an additional drive at home isn't (and it is still MUCH better than nothing).

 

Last edited: May 9, 2018

with external harddrives often only the USB to sata controller is dead, so you could take the drive out and try to connect to your pc via a. usb to sata kit, or simply install it in your pc

 

So sorry ... It happened once, and maybe it's about the head which is stuck ...
but usually it makes more noises
maybe yours is different problem? as adviced by another post, try to plug it with another cable

Just for info or as very very last solution:

By miracle and without knowing why, my hard disk ( fallen from table) worked again after so many tries of plug/unplug
but it was not stable, enough to recover main datas tho

About online data, that's not so expensive , I use OneDrive by Microsoft, 10 euros/month for 5TB
I could see other offers by differents websites, but I am afraid they close anytime.

Courage and good luck.

 

Last edited: May 9, 2018

Yeah that was a thing once. But now,
Manufacturers like to soldier the usb controller on the hard drives so many external drives have no physical sata connector. Most external drives of the last 5 yrs, especially the ones from WD, are following this trend.

 

You should definetely take the disk out of the external housing and try to connect it to a PC (if you have a MAC and an HSF fomatted drive I dont know). If the disk is recocgized by the BIOS the HDD's controller is not broken. If the controller is broken your chance is to find another drive with the same firmware and manufacturer and exchange the controller platines.
If its not the broken controller but a problem with the disks data surface there are tons of Tools to recover the data. For example:
https://www.easeus.com/data-recovery-software/

 

You might wanna try these guys. $300 flat fee of they are able to recover the data. I've used them and they got all my data back although the drive just went dead not due to physical issues.

https://www.300dollardatarecovery.com/contact-us/

 

This literally boggles mah tiny mind O_____o I mean, it saves liek .5p and catastrophically fails on every conceivable level. It almost destroys the whole freakin point of the thing!

Yeah, like others have said, should be the first step. Happened lots of times: it works plugged into desktop, despite enclosure fail. Like got that exact thing atm! Some are rly weird fails, liek partition not recog. Then throw Hiren at it. Then try replacing parts? Also make sure ya never buy Seagate evah again! Worth looking around for deals on WD drives, you can get em (12TB) drives for much cheaper than you'd think if ya look around. Well compared to (2x) Amazon price. Kinda means you can backup everything evah. Have ya got anywhere to copy this (5TB) data?

 

5tb is not such a big hdd.... start some new projects, indeed

 

5tb is alot of data. Probably worth trying to recover that of course if you have anything of value in it

 

Not to rub salt in the wound, but the old quote goes something like, "you can afford only as much storage as you can also back up." Two 2TB drives are better than one dead 5TB.

New external drives are more and more finicky because they're often paired up with the external enclosure for life. Sometimes that's automatic on-the-fly encryption (even when it's not enabled) or sometimes just addressing tricks with the USB controller, etc. Plus, sometimes extra steps are taken to get the additional capacity like RAID which makes data recovery even harder because it's not as simple as just shucking the enclosure and dropping the drive in a desktop or SMR (shingled magnetic recording) which is much more prone to data loss.

Everyone: Be careful what external HDD you use to store things to. Do the research!

 

Last edited: May 9, 2018

@lukehh, see my post above about what happens if you try to exchange the controller boards on modern hdd. You'll mess up the donor drive as well, and it won't see the data.
Been there, done that, got the raggedy ass t-shirt.

 

I second the idea to open the box and connect the drive directly to a computer ... if it is possible, of course.
Like this one :

 

You are so right. There is a company that does board swaps fairly cheap. I used them a couple of times. https://www.hddzone.com/western_digital_pcb_swap_replacement_guide.html

 

The controller board has to have exactly the same Firmware version (not only the same Type of disk)...I often fixed HDDs with this method...especially old IBM Deskstar and newer Seagate SATA drives. Take a look at the picture attached. Its not enough to have the same Disk name (ST31500528AS) but also the Firmaware has to be the same (CC46)