Recovery from damaged HDD?

[bobtheskull]

I have/had an external 400Gb HDD which housed all my wife's photo albums that she had archived for 'safe-keeping', as well as a load of ripped dvd's for my kids and a shedload of music that i'd ripped from my CD's before I stored/sold them.

All was good.... until I got out the Drive to retrieve something and it wont work. At all. The drive won't even spin up. There is no sound coming from it at all. I know the power supply is active as the power LED in the drive comes on.

I recently moved house so I'm guessing it might have been dropped or something similar in the move.

My question is, is anything recoverable from the drive in any way? Is it even possible when the thing wont even power up?

 

[atim]

If it won't spin up, you're more than likely screwed. There are ways of opening up the casing and pinpointing the problem, but if you're not experienced you might be just as likely to break something else as well.

This is just a suggestion, but is there /enough/ power coming into the HDD? I just thought of this and figured it was worth asking/mentioning.

Conceivably, if the actual disks inside of the HDD have't been physically damaged, you could take it to a professional recovery tech to have your files backed up. But usually that option is so expensive that only businesses/governments take advantage of it, from what I've heard.

Addendum: Also, try searching the make/model of your HDD in conjunction with the problem you're experiencing. See if other people have had similar problems. There might still be something you could do to get your disks to spin up.

Beyond that, I think that's all you can do.

 

[bobtheskull]

I tried 2 different power supplies, so pretty sure it's the drive itself.

Bollocks. Not a good day.

 

[atim]

Take a look through this. Sounds like freezing it may possibly make something happen.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...38691&qsubts=1371630764834&q=hdd+wont+spin+up