External HD

I think I broke my external HD. It usually sits behind my laptop on the back edge of my desk, and when I put my laptop back up there it knocked it off the edge down to the subwoofer sitting on my floor.

It started clicking several times quickly, but it still turns on. I plugged it back into my computer but it does not show up.

Any idea how I can get my data off of this? Is that even possible? Or is it possible to fix it?

I feel like such an idiot, it's just been one of those months. Thanks in advance for any help.

The clicking noise would concern me, but there's still a chance that it's recoverable. I had the same happen to me last week at work -- an external fell the top off of a tower case onto the floor. It refused to be recognized after, so I disassembled it and noticed the IDE connector had jostled loose just a tiny bit from the fall. I reseated it and it worked fine.

A click of the drive heads usually indicates a problem (or impending problem). If you can get it to be recognized, backup the important data ASAP and then run a full chkdsk (or better, Spinrite) on it to see if maybe you only damaged a couple sectors that can be flagged and deallocated.

This happened to me once. I tried all kinds of things. Finally I went to CompUSA (are they still in biz?) and they were able to do something to get everything off. $100. Try MicroCenter

Meh, not sure if it's really worth $100. I had an Apple gift card, so I bought a 320gb external HD, and this one doesn't require an external power source and is much smaller than my old one.

I've been swamped with exams this week, so hopefully this weekend I can get it unscrewed and take a look at it. There wasn't much important on it, it was just stuff I had downloaded.

I called Best Buy, and anything over 9gb is $200. I tried reconnecting everything after I took it apart, still doesn't show up. I found a program online I'm going to try out called Data Rescue (I use a Mac).

I decided to just take a video of what it's doing. Sorry for the extra post, but Data Rescue isn't even recognizing it.

Here's the link

http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuNG4ja2xH0

If anyone has any advice, it would be greatly appreciated.