hard drive malfunction

[hardwiz]

I was using an acer laptop and it had had some fan problems with parts getting stuck in it but everything was working fine. I had droped it a couple of time accidetnly and nothing happened. Then today, I dropped it and everything was working except I heard a ticking noise and thought it was the fan. 5 minutes later, my laptop freezes and i get the BSOD and im not sure but i think it said beginning physical dump drive or something. So i turn it back on and I realize it is not the fan, its the hard drive! I took out the hard drive and put it in a PC and same problem except in the pc it wont go passed the HP screen. Tried it in ANOTHER PC and the same exact problem. Can somebody tell me what to do to fix it? Is it because I dropped it? If so can I just unscrew everything on the hard drive and try to find some dislocated parts or will that mess it up even more. Im more worried about getting the data from the hard drive then the actual hard drive itself.

THANKS IN ADVANCE!

[caperjack]

well you cant take it apart unless you have a dust free environment to do so,

the inside of the harddrive resembles a record turntable ,when you dropped it the arm with the needle hit the spinning HDD platter causing the damage ,repairable maybe but very expensive .try slaving it to another computer and retrieving the files ,or using a external case to put the drive into .if you have no access to such devices take it to a computer shop and see if they can get file for you ,then buy a new HDD

[rubberman]

To add to what caperjack said:

1. Dropping a drive and/or system is not a good thing! Impact with the floor can generate 100's of G's of force on the drive. Some newer drives have sensors that detect when the drive/system is dropped and will park the read/write heads to protect the drive. Not all, however, do that. IE, your drive is probably fubar and will need to be replaced. Data recovery may be possible, but difficult. Services that will disassemble the drive (need to have a clean room environment to do that), and use specialized equipment to read the data from the drive, are available, but pricey. It could cost you up to $2000USD to recover your data that way...

[cwarn23]

well you cant take it apart unless you have a dust free environment to do so,

the inside of the harddrive resembles a record turntable ,when you dropped it the arm with the needle hit the spinning HDD platter causing the damage ,repairable maybe but very expensive .try slaving it to another computer and retrieving the files ,or using a external case to put the drive into .if you have no access to such devices take it to a computer shop and see if they can get file for you ,then buy a new HDD

In this situation this would not work because dropping the laptop would cause the pin the crush into the magnetic disk from the force of the impact. So even if the magnetic disk was removed and put into another hard drive then you would still have a corrupted hard drive that you may not even be able to boot from. Best bet would be to retrieve those backups and put them onto a new laptop. You did have backups right?

[jingda]

Just to sum it up, clicking sound means your hard disk has crash and you need to get a new one. Shorts and sweet answer :D

[burnworld]

Ya I'm afraid that the HD is damaged. I did the same thing about 2 months ago and brought it in to Best Buy, the tech said it was bad as I suspected but it was a Best Buy employee perhaps taking the easy answer. But in all respect HD can't take that kind of abuse and keep on ticking, errr, I mean working.