Data Recovery Case File · Portable Drives · Stopped After the Drop

"Stopped working after I dropped it": the honest spread of drop damage, from a jarred connection to a head crash — why testing it makes things worse, and how the Insight Forensic establishes what the fall actually did

His enquiry was brief and its cause unambiguous. A WD My Passport 1TB: "stopped working after I dropped it." A request to look at it and a cost to try. A drop is a mechanical event with a genuinely wide spread of possible consequences, and this page is honest about that range rather than pretending to know from one sentence: a fall can do anything from merely jarring a connection loose (trivial, data intact) to crashing the heads onto the platters (serious). The decode covers why the state the drive was in when it fell matters so much, why the single most damaging thing an owner can do now is power it on to "see if it still works," and how diagnostics establish exactly what this particular drop did before any recovery is attempted.

The decode: the range of drop damage, and why the moment matters

The spread, honestly: a drop can produce almost anything. At the mild end, the impact merely jarred a connection or a component loose — the drive stopped working but the mechanism and data are fine, and access can be restored simply. In the middle, the heads may have been knocked out of alignment or the head stack disturbed without catastrophic contact — recoverable with a laminar flow bench service. At the serious end is a head crash: the heads slammed into the platter surface, potentially gouging the very material the data is written on — the most damaging outcome, and the one every other precaution is aimed at avoiding compounding. From one sentence, all of these are possible, which is why honest diagnosis, not assumption, is the only responsible first step.

Why the moment of dropping matters so much: the single biggest factor in what a drop does is whether the drive was running when it fell. A powered-off drive has its heads safely parked off the platter surface, so a drop is far more survivable — the heads aren't in a position to crash. A running drive has its heads flying microscopically above spinning platters, and a sudden impact can slam them down: this is when head crashes happen. His drive "stopped working after" the drop, which tells us it experienced the fall in some powered state — making a proper assessment of the heads and surface especially important.

Why "testing" it is the worst move: here is the crucial instruction. After a drop, the overwhelming temptation is to plug it in and see if it still works — and that is precisely the most dangerous thing to do. If the drop disturbed the heads, powering on spins up the platters and loads potentially-damaged heads onto them, which can convert a survivable head disturbance into a catastrophic head crash, or turn a small amount of surface damage into a lot. Every power-on after a drop is a roll of the dice with the platter surface. So the correct response to a dropped drive is counterintuitive but vital: do not power it on — not even once to test — and let it be diagnosed by equipment that can assess the heads without risking them.

On the bench

The drive was not powered on to test — the assessment began with diagnostics, not a gamble. On the Atola Insight Forensic, the drive's heads, media surface and mechanism were evaluated to establish exactly where in the drop-damage spectrum this fall had landed: jarred, disturbed, or crashed. With the specific damage known, the appropriate path followed — a head-stack service under the laminar flow bench where the heads were implicated — and imaging ran on the PC-3000 Express under Data Extractor, reading the drive on a head map with surfaces handled according to their assessed condition. The fall's actual consequences were measured before anything spun up in earnest, which is the only safe way to treat a drop.

The outcome

The recoverable data imaged and delivered verified, the drop's damage assessed and treated according to what it actually was rather than what it might have been. Free assessment, one fixed written figure including VAT; where a drive has to be opened, 50% of parts and labour is payable upfront with the balance only on success — otherwise no recovery, no fee. The honest verdict for every dropped drive: the damage spans trivial to serious, only diagnosis tells you which — and the one certain way to make it worse is to power it on and hope.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.