So I dropped my Passport HD by accident earlier today.I plugged it in and fiddled with it under Disk Management and My Computer>Properties.Nothing helped.In the My Computer window,it says my HD has 476/700 of free space.But when I go into the hard drive,and go look through the folders,they are all empty.No video,no music.But the sub folders for everything are still there.However,under the Pictures folder,all my pictures are still there,but they are "corrupt".I can't view them.I tried copy and pasting the whole thing onto my computers HD,but an error message came up saying the files could not be located.But according to my passport,there aren't any files on it to begin with.I tried doing a defrag just to see if it would help,but defrag won't even run on this hard drive. I downloaded a few different data recovery programs,and let one of them run for almost 4 hours and it came up with nothing.I am super confused with this.The files (ie,the videos and music) seem to be ghosts.They are there,but I can't see them.I looked into Data Recovery companies,but it would coust me a couple hundred dollars (or over 1.2k for Geek Squad).I don't want to spend that much. Does anyone have any suggestions? Edit:I've tried running Testdisk and Recover My Files.Neither of which worked.Testdisk doesn't recognize there is another hd plugged in,and RMF ran for almost 4 hours and didn't find a single file

Was the drive dropped while it was powered on? Did the connection to the computer become disconnected when it dropped? Are you using the software that is included with the drive? Contact Western Digital Support for the product for suggestions or use of the tools that they provide. Email or phone, whichever you prefer. http://support.wdc.com/recovery/index.asp?wdc_lang=en Stop messing with it. The more you use it the worse the data loss can be. You may be sending it to a vendor as it doesn't sound good and you may have worsened the situation. Please, no Geek Squad. The drive was not designed for a serious g-force shock event. You could have head and\or platter damage requiring a professional to salvage the data.

On Sun, 19 Jun 2011 07:22:38 +0000, Ducket wrote: So I dropped my Passport HD by accident earlier today.I plugged it in and fiddled with it under Disk Management and My Computer>Properties.Nothing helped.In the My Computer window,it says my HD has 476/700 of free space.But when I go into the hard drive,and go look through the folders,they are all empty.No video,no music.But the sub folders for everything are still there.However,under the Pictures folder,all my pictures are still there,but they are "corrupt".I can't view them.I tried copy and pasting the whole thing onto my computers HD,but an error message came up saying the files could not be located.But according to my passport,there aren't any files on it to begin with.I tried doing a defrag just to see if it would help,but defrag won't even run on this hard drive. I downloaded a few different data recovery programs,and let one of them run for almost 4 hours and it came up with nothing.I am super confused with this.The files (ie,the videos and music) seem to be ghosts.They are there,but I can't see them.I looked into Data Recovery companies,but it would coust me a couple hundred dollars (or over 1.2k for Geek Squad).I don't want to spend that much. Does anyone have any suggestions? Clearly, you've clobbered the drive. If what's on it is important enough to you, you may be able to recover what's there if you pay a good data recovery company, but it will be considerably more than a couple hundred dollars. Short of that, it's highly unlikely that you can do anything. And whatever you do, stay far away from the Geek Squad (or any other big-box company). They are among the worst companies to use for any kind of computer service or advice. In my view, and that of lots of others of us here, many of their people are completely incompetent. Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP

I have always heard that when you have phyiscal problems with a drive you should try to wrap it in a plastic bag and put it in a freezer. Then when you pull it out, throw it back in straight away and try to copy off what data you can as fast as possible before the drive heats up and the metal expands. Dan Heim