This is an extremely common problem, especially with external drives. If this happens to you and you really care about the data on that hard drive it is our recommendation that you don’t power up the hard drive after it is dropped.

Normally hard drives have their heads parked on a head comb that is off of the platters when the drive is not in use. This is to protect the heads and the platters in the event of some kind of rough handling. Unfortunately, when a hard drive is dropped the heads usually move off of that head comb and move on to the platters. When this occurs the next time power is applied to the hard drive the motor will attempt to spin and the heads will stick to the platters and become damaged and in some cases actually be ripped of the gimbals that are at the end of the head arms. When this happens there can be a lot of media damage and may result in some data loss.

If the drive is sent to a professional data recovery specialist we know how to keep that damage from occurring and can in most cases recover all of the data. If your hard drive or notebook has been dropped don’t turn it back on, send the drive to us.