corrupted external hard drive

[Kitty Belikov]

Ok so my brother was apparently formatting his external hard drive using his laptop. The laptop was accidentally closed during this process. He now claims that the hard drive is completely useless and he is unable to recover data from it.

My question is this: should the mere action of closing a laptop cause this much damage? And should it be costing almost $500 to retrieve the files?

 

[lonewolf7]

Yes sometime it happens, this could do a damage to the external drive, but not always. And yes data recovery is expensive, the cost varies from company to company.

If your brother was formatting the drive then why is he bothered about the data, either way the data will be gone, by damaging or by formatting.

If the drive contains OS then tell him to try to repair the installation with a bootable media(DVD/USB). Or open/break the caddy/case of the external drive and connect it directly to the MB of a desktop system as a second HDD, see what happens.

If the drive has no OS on it, then also the above mentioned method will work, try it, before spending lots of money.