External Hard Drive Disaster

I have a 320Gb hard drive which was almost pretty full with music and video's… Well now its not being recognised in My Computer and in the Disk Manager it says the disk has unalocated space? WHY? Does this mean it has been formatted? Could this have been cause by it being dropped? It isn't even a year old, what could have caused this and can I get my stuff back?

Hi,
Sorry to hear of the problem with your 320Gb hard drive.
Taking your questions in turn:

1 Unallocated space usually means it is unformatted or otherwise unavailable, as it is, for use.
2 To use this space it generally means it need formatting BUT PLEASE DON'T format it without specialist advice as this will delete your data.
3 Any form of impact could damage your drive…they are delicate bits of kit, manufactured to incredibly tight tolerances and dropping them is definitely not recommended!
4 Probably the impact damage caused the problem but there are a host of other potential causes.
5 You can probably get your data back.

Sometimes this is easy and sometimes tough. There are data recovery specialists who will do this (for a price) Ontrack have a good reputation in this respect but if you fire up your favourite search engine you will find lots of others.

The decision process is complicated by the fact that if you use "Do it Yourself Tools" then if successful the cost to you of recovering the data is relatively small (possibly free or around GBP £50-£70 or USD $100 to $140) However if you are unsuccessful then the tools you have used will make the job of the Data Recovery Specialist more difficult and therefore more costly. As the Data Recovery Specialist usually cost from GBP £500, USD $1000 upwards and with really high costs if the Specialist need to use their "clean rooms" to dismantle your disc, service and realign the platters, and employ their customery legendadry electro-mechanical wizardry to pull off your data.

There are some steps that you could take as alternatives as long as you aware of the risks involved.

You don't say if your drive is internal or external, IDE, SATA, USB etc etc but you could try it in another computer and see how you go.
You could look on the case and find the manufacturer and the spec and then visit their Website and download the appropriate utility tools that will check your disc and perform a diagnostic. Neither of these two steps, if performed correctly, are likely to do more damage, and might help you.

The decisions you need to make depend to a certain extent on the value to you of the data at present unavailable to you. As only you know the value of the data, it is, as always, your call.
If the data is irreplacable and highly valuable then biting the bullet and paying the Data Recovery Specialist would seem sensible, on the other hand if its not particularly valuable to you you might feel that the "Do it Yourself" approach, despite the riks involved has merit.
Any way, good luck and I hope you manage to get your data accessible again.
Regards
paws