Help! I dropped my External Hard Disk the floor.

[Balduran]

Yesterday night, I was watching a movie over my External Personal Storage 3200 Maxtor device. While I was watching an accident occured, and someone tripped over the power cable pulling the drive from a 40 Centimeter high table, unto a wooden floor with a carpet. I heard the thing fall on the floor. I thought it was ok, and I continued the movie for about 10 seconds and it stopped moving. So I checked the HD. Turned it of and then on, and it started making this siren like noise. I can hear the windows plug and play sound when i plug it in, but i can't see the HD appear in the My Computer Section. I have spent 2 months of downloading to this device, so I will use it during my studying at college. This is a disaster for me. I checked the maxtor website, and I entered my serial number, the warranty is alive. I am in Switzerland right now, and I bought the HD from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I am hoping to use the warranty here if possible, I have no other resort but to pay if I have to. Is there a chance that my HD is still alive or possible to be fixed? and I certainly wish for the data not to be lost. 2 Months of downloading is alot for me. I haven't tried to fiddle with it much to prevent any possible further damage. All it does it this siren noise, and i can hear mechanisms noises inside.

Thanks for reading.

[Nirokun!]

my knowledge is really really limited~ but something similair happened to my PS2 HDD

apparently its a really really bad thing for your HDD to suffer physical shock while its running. the HDD? something spins really fast while running, and when there is sufficient physical shock, it fucks it up really bad

my PS2 HDD didnt survive, and i tried everything

hopefully im wrong and you can fix your thing :D sounds expensive

[Correction]

and it started making this siren like noise.

That's either a motor failing or the disk making physical contact with the reading head.

In both cases, your drive is fried.

If the data was important enough for you to pay for its retrieval, there are outfits that do data restoration from physically damaged drives.

[Almaa]

I would be concerned with sending it in to be fixed with pirated data on it.

[Cletis]

high powered electro magnets would move the reader away and would allow it to spin =D

[DarkMistSkeleton]

Ive had something like this happen except it was more like my hand pushing on the hard drive when I moved it... It ended up causing the heads to PHYSICALLY crash into the platters... So I had to get a new hard drive... I would think the same thing in this situation and... The siren... Maybe a warning that its fucked up bad? Just a guess though!