600 plus a few
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Westchester, the best Chester
Posts: 7,278
Have you put it in a computer yet to see what it does? Plug it in as a slave into your computer to see if it spins. If it spins and shows up in your drive list, but wont read, its most likely the file structure. This problem can 90% of the time be solved by software. The publisher is OnTrack and it works quite well. All file NAMES will be lost, but the files themselves will be extracted. You can tell the program exactly what file extension to back up. If you want *.jpg or *.jpeg, it will back up every single file of that type it can find, including every junk one in your temp, just because it cant tell the difference.
If it spins up, but does not show up in your drive list, it is most likely hardware (or you might not have it pinned right). If it does this, try the freezer trick. It will work MAYBE 20% of the time, if you're lucky.
If it doesn't spin at all, you'll have to send it in to get rebuilt. It isn't cheap just because most places will do the entire process in a clean room, remove the platters, and install them in a new chassis. And like any data backup, there is no guarantee that all your data will be recovered.
Next time, invest in an external HDD. You can set it up to auto-backup on a regular basis so if this ever happens again, the losses are minimal. You can get a secondary internal instead of external, it is cheaper, but there are tons of uses for a nice external.