Dropped hard drive

Dropped my 500 GB external hard drive where I store all my music, while it was plugged in and I was playing music off it. Now it just clicks when I plug it into the laptop.

I doubt there's anything I can do, but Google is pretty much useless for this shit these days, every link is to some hard drive recovery service masquerading as a "repair guide". Can anyone give me some clear advice on what my options are? Even if it's something risky to try. At this point, I don't have $1,000 for a data recovery service, so I'll take my chances.

Thanks.

Explain some more the sounds you hear from the drive and when they occur in the drive operations. 

When it was dropped were you just playing files or were things being moved around or copied/deleted.  (keep in mind if you are using progrms like iTunes then the answer is yes, as every time a file is played it is re-saved with thier play statistics)  If this is yes, then the catalog file for the drive maybe corrupt.  In the past, used programs like DiskWarrior (mac) to deal with these types of issues.

Another option is to get an identical drive and as long as the platters are not scratched, you can swap them.  (there's plenty of technical details involved in this...)

Does your laptop recognize that the drive is connected?

If it does you may have the ability to run the unix utility dd, which will make an exact copy of the drive.  Takes a long time but does the work.  Then you can work in a protected environment to recover the main catalog file.

And you will find more technically minded folks in the How-To's Technical forums.

none,

Thanks for the reply.

I had Winamp playing at the time, but the volume was down because I was on the phone, so I don't know what was playing at that precise moment, it's possible it was a song on my laptop I hadn't backed up to the drive yet. 

What I heard when I picked up the drive off the floor was a slow clicking noise like something was stuck. I turned the drive off, unplugged the power and eSATA cables. I open the case to make sure nothing had come loose, but everything in the enclosure looked fine. I plugged it back in, this time connected through USB. My computer recognized that a USB drive had been plugged in, I heard a couple clicks from the drive, could feel the drive spinning when I touched the case, and once in awhile it would make that noise old HDDs make when they're trying to read data. My laptop would not pick up the drive.

I have the drive in the freezer right now. I don't know what else to do.

You might take some solace from being in a select club and maybe a few tips from the responses.

Thanks, Bingowings. I got the freezer tip from there, actually. The only club I belong to is the Too Lazy to Back-Up Club.

So you aren't going to try the Urethra trick?

asterisk8 wrote: My computer recognized that a USB drive had been plugged in

This is a good sign as it shows that some of the circuits which control the communications between your machine and the drive are undamaged.

The freezer trick sounds like a great idea but there are multiple avenues to approach before putting the drive in the freezer.  and the thing with putting a computer device into a place which is a highly concentrated moisture box is that now all the smaller components are now more likely to fail because you've placed the  in  a   moisture   box....  The freezer trick is a last resort because it can phuck up things which were not broken before.  I've also noted that when they recommend the freezer trick they also say that you've got one or two shots after getting it out to get the data off, before it fails in new spectacular ways.  So this is a last resort and very much not recommended.

I would recommend that for now you put the drive aside.  Get your mind wrapped around the idea that you will not see the data for at least 6 months (maybe forever) as you need to teach yourself new technologies and possibly get a bunch of new tools.

What is the drive type? 

I had a USB drive fail, and to get the contents off I needed to take the HDs out.  They were typical sATA drives and you can get a cable to hook directly into your computer.  For whatever reason the USB interface failed and maybe this is a similar problem with your drive.

After getting a drive of equal size, dd was able to then replicate the drive as best it could then DiskWarrior fixed the catalog b-tree issues on the replication.  and I got most of the data back.  99%.  This was maybe 2004ish on an even older mac, the drive was a 250gb and the dd process took a solid week 24/7.  A possible reason why dd works is that it doesn't need to seek for data, it's just slowly crawls line by line over the drive.  The clicking you maybe hearing is the drive arm seeking over the disks to find some catalog information, so it knows where files are stored.  dd is not concerned so it may bypass much of the systems which controls the arms and just crawls along.  I believe dd takes multiple passes per line compares then then writes out the data.

When you buy your new drive, buy two.  I'm personally on a WD My Passport Essential SE kick.  When on sale 1tb is around 100 bucks.

Thanks again, none. I think I may have ruined it in the freezer, but I'm going to just put it aside like you said, and see what I can figure out. Luckily it was just music, most of which I can re-rip or download. At least it wasn't anything irreplaceable.