I/O device error after dropping external HDD

[Ricardo]

Hey everyone,

I have an external hard drive which suffered damage after being dropped. I’ve already tried several things but can’t get it working again. Before I buy a new drive, I wanted to see if there are any solutions I haven’t tried yet or if the drive is truly dead.

The drive itself was orignally serving as an OS drive for an old MacBook. This computer won’t recognise the drive at all anymore.
When I attach it to my Windows PC, the drive gets recognised but I can’t seem to do anything with it. It shows up under device manager and disk management but that’s about it. When I try to use a program like HFSExplorer the program just freezes when trying to read from the HDD.

What I’ve tried so far:

• Several small fixes I found when googling “external HDD I/O device error”; like checking cable connections, updating/reinstalling drivers, etc… None of those work, but I also wouldn’t expect those to work considering the damage occured due to a drop.
• Formatting the drive through disk management or command prompt. This just shows me the message “The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.”.
• Try to repair the drive using chkdsk in the command prompt. It completes succesfully, but claims no errors were found.

Other info:

• When checking the drive through disk management, no drive letter is assigned to the drive. I’m pretty sure it did that before even though it uses a Mac file system.
• Disk management shows the drive is split into three partitions, but also shows the drive as having 100% free disk space.
• This is actually the second time the drive was dropped. The first time it was dropped from a short height (10-20cm) while the macbook was shutting off. The OS wouldn’t boot up anymore then, but I was able to resolve it back then by reformatting the drive under Windows and doing a clean OS install. This time the drive was dropped while the MacBook was sleeping but unfortunately it was from a greater height (1.5m or so).

Any help is appreciated!

[Bruce]

I pulled a HDD from a PC and was carrying it and other parts to the car.
the drive slipped of the top, from a 1m height - and that killed it.
since the head was parked, I was expecting the unit to be OK but it wasn’t.
so I’m not surprised yours is also dead.

if you really want the data back, your only choice is one of those forensic data recovery labs.
they’ll strip your drive and put the platters into another drive.
but they can be alarmingly expensive.

[Ricardo]

Thanks for the reply. That’s what I was afraid of.
Luckily there was no important data on the drive, so just a minor inconvenience really.

[Bruce]

that’s good news then.
yeah - gravity and hard drives are never good bed fellows.

I’ll close this as solved.