External HDD help - recover and check reliability

[MosesSupposes]

Hey guys, so here is what happened to my ION Tri-Select 160GB 7200 external HDD:

So my computer and external HDD were on. I accidentally dropped a load of textbooks on my desk (close to where my HDD was), and as soon as I did so, the external made terrible grinding, chugging noises for about 30 sec. Anyways, my computer froze, all of the lights on the ION turned off, then back on, and then the bad news came…my computer said that I had lost data on two of my external’s partitions

So my questions are:

-Does anyone know of any way that I can recover the data on those two partitions, or are they truly gone for good?

-Can I trust the integrity of the external now? Is it reliable to continue using, or should I be shopping for a new external? Can I do any inspections? I also don’t want to lose the data that is still on there.

The drive still runs like it did before, and it doesn’t make any odd noises when on, but the sounds it made when I dropped my books seemed pretty bad. Thanks for any help you can offer. I really don’t have the cash to buy another external and have only average tech savviness, so I’d hope the one I have is still usable/fixable. Also, I’m stuck with the external at my place with my PC—i.e., no mac—so if there is software I can use, it’d be more convenient if it was for windows, but not a huge issue.

 

[robbieduncan]

You computer probably said that you MIGHT have lost data. As long as nothing was writing to the drive at the time you are probably OK. The only data you could loose in this case would be data in the drive cache that had not been written to the disk yet.

 

[MosesSupposes]

hmm...well nothing was being written at the time it happened, but the data is definitely not showing up any more. I had gigs of data prior to this, and now both sections show up completely empty (~32GB Free Disk Space each)...

 

[robbieduncan]

Sounds very fishy. What format are the partitions? Did you do anything else (try and restore them in any way, use any other programs etc)?

 

[MosesSupposes]

They're all Fat32. Hence the 32GB free on the two partitions. As for what I've done to try and restore, well nothing really so far. I've only turned it on twice since it happened as I'm trying to figure out if I should minimize my use of it just in case the hdd is toast. Also, I'm trying to figure out what to do before tinkering around with it further...At the very least, can I still trust it to hold my data that wasn't lost, or am i gonna be making a trip to the computer store soon?

 

[robbieduncan]

FAT is very intollerant as it's not journalled. Sounds like you have lost or corrupted the File Allocation Table (FAT). I would recommend getting some Windows disk recovery software. The data should all still be there as long as you are not using those partitions, it's just the file system doesn't know where.

 

[MosesSupposes]

Thanks for the info robbie. Will give this a shot.