Broken external HD - data recoverable?

[habilis]

The bottom line is I have an ion external HD that got dropped on the floor and broken. Now when I fire it up it makes a clanking noise and I can't read from it. Since I'm not a data forencics engineer what are the chances I can recover data from this? Is it even possible? Lets say the discs are still in perfect condition but the reader arm is broken, could I recover the data somehow? There were a large number of home movies on this thing that I want back.

[artov]

Yes, there are firms that do recover data from broken disks, even if
the reader arm is broken. The catch is the price; they more or less recover
the data a bit at a time. I have (luckily) no knowledge which is best,
but google gave Ibas.com (actually their finnish site) first. Check for the
disks they have recovered: http://gfx.ibas.com/news/pictures/burned_pc.jpg

[Decade]

In the US, DriveSavers is a company I know, largely because they've come to MacWorld every time I've gone. My hard drives haven't failed in a way that required their service, so I don't know how good they are.

If you're not a hard drive engineer, you probably can't fix that yourself. The heads probably are dislodged and have probably gouged out some random part of your data. A common technique in that case is to have good hard drive heads of your own on hand. The equipment inside is also really tiny, with annoying strange screw heads holding it together. You probably don't even have the equipment to service it.

One alternative you could consider is just giving up those movies. Moments in time have usually been given up to history, and before all this technology they were experienced and put into the past without regret. I sometimes wonder about the possible psychoses of people who don't experience life without it being documented and coming back to haunt them at some random moment. More prosaically, a full hard drive recovery can take hundreds of dollars, or even more if the drive surface is damaged.

[PGTips]

Hundreds of dollars is a small price to pay for the chance of saving those videos. Especially so if they're important videos, like that of a wedding, or of a relative who is no longer around.