Dropped Hard Drive = Sadness

Hey everyone!

I'm a long-time reader, first-time poster and am desperately hoping that you guys/gals can help me out.

In short, my cat decided last night that she likes the usb cables dangling from my disconnected 1tb Iomega desktop hard drive and consequently brought the whole thing crashing to the hardwood floor. I thought it might be ok, because it's had a couple other minor bumps, but apparently not.

So now when I connect it to my Macbook I can hear things in motion but there's a small clicking noise along with it's thinking noises (which I've learned from other posts is ominous and bad) and a bubble pops up saying "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer. Initialize... Ignore. Eject."

Having just backed up all my music, pictures and documents (literally last week) and then deleted most of the mentioned from my computer, I'm obviously devastated at this turn of events. I've tried taking it to a computer place and all they said was that "it's broken" and that they could try to fix it for a minimum of $150 (which is more than I paid for the stupid thing to begin with!). May be worth it if I can't find help online, but thought I'd turn to the trusty MacForums folks first.

Does anyone know any tricks/tips on how to salvage the stuff of the hard drive? I'm fairly computer savvy, not amazing like most of you, but can follow a mean direction.

Thanks in advance, I really really reeeeally appreciate your help.

kristin.is.coy said:

Does anyone know any tricks/tips on how to salvage the stuff of the hard drive? I'm fairly computer savvy, not amazing like most of you, but can follow a mean direction.

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Not really. If a hard drive is broke...its broke! If that stuff on the HD is that important...and the folks you spoke with could recover things for a minimum of $150...that's not a bad price. I know some crashed/broke hard drive recovery services used to cost over $1000.

Yupp...those cats are a pain in the neck when it comes to computers...we hear about cat issues ALL THE TIME!

- Nick

The same thing happened to me except it wasn't a cat it was a friends child.... I have 670GB of music-movies-pictures which documents a decade of my life in a foreign country and most is stuff I can't really get back so easy (if at all). I tried Data Rescue but it just got 350GB and many of the files it recovered are unsorted without their names, movies unnamed without their subtitles files etc. It's a mass. Any ideas? Any better software to use? I'm desperate and I can't afford to go to a data recovery person at the moment plus they are much more expensive in this country.

You're both in the same boat. If Data Rescue 3 could not get all of your data (and it's the best software IMO) then your only choice is data recovery. Note that even with professional data recovery, you may still have the same problem sorting out file names, etc. as you indicated above.

The lesson here is never store valuable photos and family history items on only one form of media. Use DVDs, Blue Rays, whatever.... Hard drives fail, even when not dropped.

With sympathies for your respective situations, I recently helped a young married friend, who works from home, attach a 40 mm width board, with slits cut for cables, on three of the four edges of his computer work desk. Dangling cables are irresistible to young children, and playful moggies, but they can't drag the hardware off my friend's desk now.