HDD head crash?

[zkslv]

Hi, I could use some opinions on my situation:

A small PC speaker dropped from my desk on to my powered hard drive (Western Digital WD30EURS). Is there any chance it didn't cause a head crash? Is there any chance it might be fixable without using expensive data recovery companies?

When i plug it in it still seems to spin up, yet it appears it's struggling and my PC tends to boot up slowly (OS isn't on this disk, it was only used as storage). At first, after the accident, everything seemed to work fine, but soon the disk started taking longer time to access the files and after a short time my PC stopped detecting the drive...


Here's what usually happens step by step:

- I connect the drive

- it sounds relatively normal

- I can see it in the bios

- I proceed and let Windows boot

- booting takes a long time (clearly has something to do with this drive since if I disconnect it it boots normally)

- Windows finally boot up, but they hang for a while and after I finally manage to access disk management (or anything for that matter) I can't see the drive anymore and the drive appears to have stopped spinning.


Any help and thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey zkslv. I'm sorry to hear you're having such issues with your drive. If the drive is not spinning, unfortunately there's not much you can do about it. Did you hear any unusual noise/sounds coming from the drive after that? Are you using the drive with an external enclosure or a SATA to USB connection, or a docking station? I'd recommend that you try connectin the drive internally via a SATA cable and see if the same thing happens. If you get it to work, the first thing you should do, is to backup any important data which you might have on it. If it's working, but you're having trouble accessing the drive, you could try via Linux Live USB/CD or some of the data recovery options from this thread here: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
After that download DLG (Data Lifeguard Diagnostic) to test the drive and see if any errors or bad sectors pop-up. Here's where you can download it from: Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows

Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD