Which brand of harddisk is this, is it one of those external ones?
Anyway your best bet is to
- As much as possible try not to move the drive at all, if its a mechanical damage any movement will further degrade the drive. (I.e try to keep the drive in situ as much as possible
- Data recovery if the drive is still functional is no different then getting a recovery software and trying to recover it yourself, the company might have more hardware to place the drive into for extraction but the approach is quite similar
- In a situation where the mechanical parts are damages the cost from what I know is not economically viable (unless you have some million dollar work stuff on it)
Those external type drives are usually stuffed with crappy harddrives and do suffer wear and tear much easier (hence they're so cheap). The 2.5 inch ones are more durable as they are designed to be moved around.
Also if it appears on the computer as D there is still some hope, I would get a good recovery software and try to extract it. Do also note the earlier advise about the noise from the drive.
Hello,
My HDD seems to have failed. When I plug it into computers, it only shows up as external drive D:. Is there any way to save it?
If not, do I need to use a data recovery service? How much is that going to cost?