Well i was watching my aunts dog at her house for a week and i had my 640Gb Western Digital External hard drive sitting on the table and i was playing with the dog and it ran around the table and stepped on the cord and the hard drive slammed on the ground.. and it stopped working and just clicked. so i opened it up and i gave it a little nudge and it shot out a bunch of dust and spun again. the computer will recognize it as a "unknown device" and i cant use it it had everything on it and now i dont know if there is a way to get it back. what would you guys do?
When you say you opened it, do you mean you took the hard drive itself apart or just the external enclosure? So the drive was running when it fell? You could take the drive out of the enclosure and hook it up directly to a computer. As the controller board in the enclosure may be toasted. If that doesn't work, then the RW head has been toasted, the PCB board is broken, the platters have scratches on them. If the drive itself seems to be toast, you can find the same make/model/revision drive, take both apart and put the platters from the old drive into the new drive. Since the drive was running when it fell, this is not good.
i took the cover off the hard drive itself like where the discs are, and the hard drive does spin now..
Since the drive spins up, there could be a problem with the controller board, the actuator arm, the RW heads, the platters could be scratched. Since the computer says unknown device, a good bed is the controller board and it's connections. To save your data (without sending it to a professional recovery service) you'll need to swap the platter for those in a working drive.
Unfortunately you're SOL with that clicking noise. I've even taken mine to a repair data recovery shop & they weren't able to recover either. Carbonite FTW (I too have had the same trouble as you Riggs & have since switched to an online backup solution)
