Western Digital broken hard drive

[kmaster224]

My mom has a Western Digital passport portable HDD. She was using it one day and she dropped it. Ever since then, she hasn't been able to use it. When you plug it into the computer, the HDD starts up and starts spinning. It recognizes there is an attached device and installs the software. When you go into My Computer it is usually not there. If it is, when you click on it, the computer tries to load it and then freezes up. If I go into Device Manager when its plugged in, it shows up and says it is working. We went to Best Buy and they said they could send it in to their facility and it was a level 2 which is $250. They said it could be a level 3 which is super expensive. And if they couldn't fix it, it would still cost $100.

She is a school teacher so she has tons of important stuff on there, but she never backed it up. It is more important than you know for her to get her data back. If I could just get the data back on my HDD she would go and get a HDD to put it on. She doesn't want to, but she would send it out to get the data recovered. Does anyone know what is wrong? Or how to fix it? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you

 

[COLGeek]

I would suggest taking the HDD out of the WD enclosure and connecting directly to see if the HDD is defective or the enclosure circuitry is the problem. If the enclosure is the problem, you can always get one cheap from newegg.com.

 

[kmaster224]

Should I put it in my computer with SATA cables? or does that not matter?

 

[COLGeek]

Most likely it is a SATA HDD in the enclosure so you will have to use SATA data and power connectors to attach it to your system.