Hard drive problem..

[Mattiethomas]

Alright, I had my internal hard drive hooked up to another computer today, it was sitting on the side of my case and I was going to transfer files to another that was attached. I started transfering and got up to leave as it transfered.

The case was in the way, so I pushed it to the side out of the way gently, not thinking about where my hard drive was, it hit the side of my desk and the transfer froze. I then started hearing a strange clicking noise - Would go like click - click - click - stop - click - click - click. So I unplugged it and replugged after turning the computer off and it still made the noise, also not showing up in the bios or IDE detection when booting, it would make the screen freeze when detecting IDE's, I unplugged the..(Data? Not the power) cable in the back and the detection read my other hard drive and started booting Windows. I tried waiting for a bit as it clicked, and after maybe 5 minutes, the hard drive would stop and I'd have to reattach the power cord to get it to start back up. I tried while on the desktop, attaching it (Which it still made the clicking noise) and tried 'Add Hardware' in the control panel, but it didnt read it for a while, I let it sit on that for a bit, after it stopped clicking and 'turned off' I reattached the power cord and it finally said it "found *hard drive name*", but then froze when the hard drive started clicking again; Which is right after I plug it in.

I'm wondering how a small hit on my desk made it screw up like this. Any idea's?

[Caboose]

It's dead.

[JellyWarrior]

Your hard drive has a spinning plate with a needle sitting above it. Don't sound surprised that bumping it might have damaged it.

Most hard drives are surprisingly resistant, especially when switched off or sitting idle. Yours was active and transferring data. There is a good chance that you damaged the head, the platter or both.

To give you an idea on the proportions of hard drives, here is a quote from Dr Karl's great moments in science (an interesting read if you have nothing better to do):

To give you a mental picture of the relative sizes of all the parts, let's scale up all the sizes 200,000 times bigger.

The head is now the size of the Empire State Building (400 m x 100 m x 100 m) lying on its side. It's flying across the disc at a relative speed of 17,000,000 kph, "floating" on a bubble of air just 2.5 cm thick. It's amazing that this distance is so small. The head (the Empire State Building) reads or writes a new bit of information (a “1” or a “0”) every 10 cm, as it zooms along at 17,000,000 kph. The quality of the engineering needed to design and build this is astonishing.

Link - click here

I've literally dropped my USB 2.5" hard drive onto hard tiles several times, and also knocked over my 3.5" external hdd, but the difference was that the unit was switched off. The head was locked.

I'd hate to say it but your hard drive is probably damaged beyond "cheap" repair.

[Mattiethomas]

Alright, so that means if I took it to Best Buy or somewhere, they wouldn't be able to atleast recover the files on it or anything?

[Roofus]

Alright, so that means if I took it to Best Buy or somewhere, they wouldn't be able to atleast recover the files on it or anything?

No. At Circuit City, we hook your drive up to a USB device ("The datamig toy") and simply copy your files. Best Buy likely does the same.