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kevshore

kevshore

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Kevin
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My son recieved a 1TB Western Digital external hard drive as one of his christmas presents.
It all went well and he transferred about 160gb of data to it. :) BUT
he accidently knocked it off his desk and now the drive no longer shows on 'my computer'.
I've connected it to my laptop and after the usual 'new hardware installed' bit, it still doesn't show the drive in 'my computer'.
Is it wrecked? Is all lost, or can I do something to help him out? :shrug:
Any help would be appreciated. A bit out of my depth here.


Kev.
 
If you can hear the drive spinning then the likelyhood is you have damaged/broken the spindle arm which is probably the weakest physical component, in short, Knackered.
 
Thanks guys. Suspected as much. I just feel for the lad. A lot of info lost...


Kev.
 
well, assuming your home insurance policy has too high an excess value to make it worthwhile claiming, and that your not dodgy enough to take it back as a "unwanted present - he got another one from his granny", then i'd be tempted to open it up and see if the HD will work within a normal machine. If the HD works, then it's probably the controller that's munged, but at least you can use the disk. If the disk's stuffed, then try and source an identical bare HD (which at 1tb should be fairly cheap).
 
I'll probably just get him another and see if the blokes at the computer shop can rescue anything. Thanks for all of the advice.

Kev.
 
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Kev where do you live m8.

I'll sort any data off it for you if you need to. Local computer shops will probably charge you a fortune and say they can't recover anything.

If your anywhere in the North west I'll have a look, I have a full data recovery suite thats just got me 100 pictures back off a cf card that I thought I'd lost forever. Believe me they where priceless to me and couldn't be shot again.

Just out of interest is it a full size external or a laptop size pocket one ?
 
Hi Chris. Very kind of you to offer. It's a full size hard drive. He's out until later, I'll ask him how important the data is and if he needs it recovering.
Many thanks for the offer.

Kev.
 
kevshore said:
My son recieved a 1TB Western Digital external hard drive as one of his christmas presents.
It all went well and he transferred about 160gb of data to it. :) BUT
he accidently knocked it off his desk and now the drive no longer shows on 'my computer'.
I've connected it to my laptop and after the usual 'new hardware installed' bit, it still doesn't show the drive in 'my computer'.
Is it wrecked? Is all lost, or can I do something to help him out? :shrug:
Any help would be appreciated. A bit out of my depth here.


Kev.
Click to expand...

Back to the shop it was obviously faulty when it was purchased :rules:
 
TheBigYin said:
Note to self : don't buy anything in the classifieds from marc2004
Click to expand...

:lol:

Sad thing is I'm too honest for my own good!

On a serious note I had a similar problem with a 500gb drive removed it from the case and fitted into another one and now works fine. I hadn't dropped mine though so it might not work for you :-(
 
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I wouldn't return it as sold as damaged. Just not my style. I'm in business myself and have seen plenty of customers 'trying it on'. Really pi*&%s me off.

Kev.
 
If he can't easily get anything back of the new (broken) drive, it may not be too late to recover it from wherever it was copied from (presumably the main PC hard drive?).

When you delete something it isn't really gone until you write over it. Given it was a Christmas present, and Christmas was only a couple of days ago, the vast majority of the data can probably therefore be just be "undeleted" from the original drive. There are a million different programs to do that, many of them free, but I don't use PCs anymore so can't recommend anything specific. Key thing to make that successful though is to make sure you don't write over the data! That means avoid using that drive as much as possible until you've recovered the data, and recover it to another drive. You'll be able to get more detailed tutorials via Google for whichever specific software you get.

It may be that one of the other options will work anyway, but getting the data back from the original (not the new broken) drive may be much easier so worth bearing in mind.

Hope he gets back what he needs,

David
 
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