Hi,

My idiotic little brother jumped and fell off his bed and onto the power cord of my 300 GB external HDD. So the HDD falls to the floor with a big thud. I plug it back in and it turns back on, and seems to work o.k.

I tried it yesterday, seemed to work. Did a disc surface check, didn't seem to do anything. Now today, I can sometimes hear squeaking sounds, and it is constantly freezing, and taking forever for data to transfer. So obviously he's screwed it up big time, and I have tons of important data on it that will not fit back onto my main HDD.

I saw something like this when my brother's internal HDD (kind of old) just started making these noises, wasn't working properly, and then just flat out died a few days later.

I tried to go to the Iomega website, but they must be having some sort of problem, because the Europe site keeps asking me for some password to simply see the site in my window. The windows says that the site is "private". I'll probably going to send it in for warranty repair when I can view it again, but I'm moving overseas in less than two weeks now.

So I tried the American site, and I went to the support page and it said that my model's warranty had expired. The box said that E.U. members (me) have a warranty of two years though. It said that to disprove the warranty, I need to have my receipt, whch I don't have anymore...

So say I can get it repaired in the middle east, I'm scared that they'll do something that will make me loose all of my data, which as an animator is not an option! What are the chances of them doing something like replacing a disc or simply wiping it in this case?

Hey Ohar,

Well, first of all a standard warranty would not cover accidental damages. If this is the case you will be travelling a very thin line. If there is no evidence of damage both internal and external you may get away with it. In some cases, they could charge you an absolute fortune to get the disk repaired and sent back to you. HDD manufacturers rarely perform data recovery services as well.

An alternative if data is important is to send the disk to a data recovery agency if the disk in not accessable. If the data is still accessable, fantastic, because all you need is an identical disk, and copy that data off the drive sooner rather than later.

EDIT: Marked as Answered.