Dropped My Passport, accidentally 😢

Yesterday, I made one of the biggest screw ups in my life - I accidentally dropped my external hard drive. It's a 2TB My Passport Ultra model which was manufactured by WD. I bought it on Lazada last year with the price of about RM350 (or USD100$), which is kind of pricey for me.

I love to download videos - movies, anime(s) and a bunch of TV series in high quality, 720p minimum. I've downloaded about 400 movies (all in Blu-ray), 35 anime series (all episodes), and 10 other TV series (all episodes). So far, about 1.1 TB of space is consumed.

These past three months, after my SPM examinations, I became lifeless. I felt so weak to do things, so ended up spending most of my time watching those videos. I download those videos at the Internet cafe once in a week since I have no high speed Internet connection at home. I just download things that I like or things that rated good by critics. Well, enough with the appetizers, time to move on to the main dish.

Okay, here's the thing, I don't like to talk crap for nothing. Since I've talked enough crap, just assume that I have something big here (spoiler alert: it might not be something big for the pros in computing stuff, but it might be something worth for 'amateurs' like me or for those have no many ideas about computers).

Since I'm not a pro, I googled about dropping external hard drives. I discovered that many people (amateurs like me) were trying to find a solution for this problem. They asked questions on forum sites, but no favourable answers were given.

After dropping my drive, I tried to connect it to my lappy to make sure if everything's okay. Unfortunately, I am no friend of luck. The drive was working, but it was very slow. I was waiting about 30 minutes just for the files in the drive to load. The videos on the drive were lagging. This was the problem that the others were facing mostly.

I disconnected the drive, and erased the drive information on my lappy by uninstalling it from my lappy, so that my lappy would try reinstall the drive. However, things gotten worse. When I reconnect the drive, it powered up (the light was on) but my lappy couldn't detect it. So, I suspected an internal damage on the drive. I applied force by clenching the drive with my hands while it's connected as I thought that it would help to realign the internal components of the drive. Then, my lappy was managed to detect it. However, the drive couldn't be installed. I tried to restart my lappy, but nothing happened and the drive was unable to be detected anymore.

That's the moment I started to google about it by leaving the drive connected. I found many problems like mine in forums, but nothing about definitive answers.

I noticed that a 'tick' sound is coming from the drive for every 15 seconds or something. By the fear of doing more possible damage, I turned off my lappy.

The real pain of such situation is the risk of losing files in the hard drive. I learned that many don't care about the drive, they only care about the files in it. So, I searched about recovering files from the drive. It turns out such thing is possible but it would really expensive. The alternative option was using recovering software, like Remo. But I don't believe it, it doesn't make sense. Those who promote such ideas on the Internet seemed suspicious, they probably want to make money from selling crappy softwares.

The most sh#@ty thing I read on the Internet was about an advice to make sure prepare a back up for such situations. How the f#@k that's gonna help since it already happened? Another thing is the suggestion to return it to the manufacturer to redeem it. That means losing all the datas. But that's not gonna help since the warranty period has expired.

I'm currently broke, I'm in no shape to buy a new hard drive and plus, my lappy's hard drive is almost full. Even if I manage to recover data the drive, I don't have anywhere else to store it. So, my only option is to repair it. What I've learnt from the forums in the Internet was that it's almost impossible to repair hard drives.

Like they say, don't trust everything on the Internet. Internet is not very reliable, from hours of surfing you might get nothing helpful. As a matter of fact, no reliable answers were found.

What I'm more pissed about the answers is the relevancy of it. People google such things so that they might have ideas about what's wrong. But what those in the Internet provide were common solutions, like returning and sending it to an expert. Talking like a rabbi - f#@k them for not being helpful. I'm really pissed about it, so I decided to take things on my own.

I googled about the components of an external hard drive. The most important part of a hard drive is the disc-like component in the drive that called platter. Platter is where all the datas were stored (the memory centre).

It doesn't matter how hard you drop your hard drive, as long as the platter is safe, your drive can be saved.

I suspect that mine is having problems because of other components and I'm positive that it's going to be fine after fixing the other components. It's gonna work normal again. I'm gonna send it for repairs tomorrow. I'll update soon for the results.

P/s: I actually wanted to talk about the platter, but for dramatic purposes, I made it very long.