G Technology 1TB mobile USB3.0 Hard Drive

I dropped my hard drive. What do I do?

February 13th, 2018

Dropping anything we care about is never a good feeling as it hits the ground. This is especially true with external hard drives. The damage caused needs professional help to retrieve the valuable information. External hard drives, also known as portable hard drives, have physical moving parts. Dropping or bumping them especially while in use often leads to the external hard drive failing. Drops from heights over 1-2 feet on hard surfaces (hardwood floors, tile) usually require data recovery in order to retrieve your files.

Do Not Try Software

Any Do-it-yourself or software will not be able to fix problems with a dropped external hard drive. You won’t be able to recover data on the external hard drive from software since the problem is physical issues. If your hard drive was dropped, software won’t and often makes matters worse as you are running the drive in a failed state. Drives ran in a failed state can often lead to data loss or more serious damage.

If You Hear Clicking, Stop

If a hard drive is dropped and it isn’t working anymore, it is likely that the platters, arm or head of the hard drive were damaged or misaligned from the drop. If the head is trying to locate the data that it is searching for on the platters and it cannot find it, the arm will move back and forth across the platters. The head is attached to an arm that hits a stop every time it goes back and forth, which makes the clicking noise. At that point there you should get in touch with a data recovery specialist for a recovery plan

What You Can Do

If you need to retrieve the files stored on your dropped external portable hard drive, contact me or view my section about hard drive recovery. I will walk you through your options for getting your valuable data back.

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Recover important data today. Email, or submit a form to start the process and I will give you a call back.

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