Dropped MBP: HDD Shot - Can Data Be Recovered?

[Saladsamurai]

Yes. This is the worst thing a person can do. Not back up their data and then drop their out-of-warranty 2008 MBP killing its hard disk. At least I believe it's the HDD that is shot. I'll know more in morning after running diagnostics.

My question is this: if a hard drive fails due to a drop (it was a pretty gentle drop, but not gentle enough), is it possible to recover the data on it? If yes, by what kinds of techniques?

Any guidance is appreciated. My wife is freaking out (it's her MBP with all of her photos and music that she recorded on it).

Thanks.

 

[crammedberry]

Sorry this happened to you, it happened to me once after a fall and I tried everything. Unfortunately if the disk isn't spinning up or reading anything then there isn't much that you can do. You can try to send it to one of those data recovery places that have a clean room, as they will open up the drive, take out the platters and read them using another drive. However those options run up in price, I contacted a few and the cost to recover a shot drive ran into the thousands. I lost some pictures which were pretty valuable but I couldn't pay thousands of dollars for the chance that maybe, just maybe they might recover something.

What you can try to do is see if you can get another computer to recognize it, maybe place it in an external enclosure and see if that helps at all. You can also try one of those recovery programs, I wouldn't pay for them outright but some have some beta versions you can try just to see if your disk is alive at all. When it happened to me nothing helped. Hopefully you'll have better luck, if what you have is extremely valuable you can try a data recovery place with a clean room, I've heard some positive stories from people who have had their data recovered.