HDD recovery following low impact damage

[TotallyClueless]

Hi, hoping someone can advise me please. When moving my tower I managed to slip and it dropped onto its side on a hard surface. It was switched off at the time, and when I restarted it, it failed to boot. I've taken out the HDD and connected externally to another device. It is recognised, and the two partitions are shown... so far so good! However, when I try to explore the data drive, I get an "Error performing inpage operation" message. Strangely, when I tried a second time, the disk tried to autoplay and many files were listed before I cancelled the operation. Despite that, I still can't access the files through explorer.

Professional data recovery isn't economical, so I'm hoping for suggestions... I'm not sure if trying a chkdsk recovery is sensible, or whether to go for a recovery tool like ddrescue maybe? Any other suggestions?

 

[Mattios]

If you can afford to lose the data, then yes use some recovery software, but that is at your own risk.

 

[reedo_43]

Put the drive back in the pc and run chkdsk. It is non destructive and may fix you issue. Good luck!

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

I strongly advise you not to run chkdsk on a physically damaged hard disk.

Use the manufacturers bootable diagnostic disk (hard disk in current PC)
or a Windows diagnostic program such as WD datalifeguard or Seagate equivalent
if temporaraly in anothe PC

Then you will get a good idea how bad the damage is and can get advice on how to proceed

down load from hard disk manufacturers web site
(Seagate bootable disk version works on other brands as does WD data life guard for Windows)

regards
Mike Barnes

 

[TotallyClueless]

Hi

I strongly advise you not to run chkdsk on a physically damaged hard disk.

Use the manufacturers bootable diagnostic disk (hard disk in current PC)
or a Windows diagnostic program such as WD datalifeguard or Seagate equivalent
if temporaraly in anothe PC

Then you will get a good idea how bad the damage is and can get advice on how to proceed

down load from hard disk manufacturers web site
(Seagate bootable disk version works on other brands as does WD data life guard for Windows)

regards
Mike Barnes

Thanks for the advice Mike, I downloaded WD data life guard as suggested. It recognises the drive, but only gives size info for the first partition. Any attempt to further check gives 06-Quick Test on drive 2 did not complete! Status code = 07 (Failed read test element), Failure Checkpoint = 97 (Unknown Test) SMART self-test did not complete on drive 2!
I guess that suggests little chance of any recovery, as I originally expected... however, the fact that it began to autorun successfully still gives me slight hope that it may be an intermittent fault.
Given where I am, I guess ddrescue is worth a try, but I need to source a new backup drive just in case there is any data that can be recovered.
Assuming nobody has any better options... ??