A reader asks: “I dropped my hard drive. How could I possibly fix it?”

That depends on exactly what broke.

Pick up the drive and gently shake it. Is there loose stuff inside the housing? If you hear pieces rattling around, you may have broken one or more of the disc platters (disc platters are often made of glass, coated with a metallic layer). And if platters are broken, then for all practical purposes, the drive is toast.

If the drive seems solid, but simply doesn’t work properly when you plug it in, there are several steps you can take to try to recover it. The process varies depending on whether the drive spins up at all; or spins up, but doesn’t get recognized and assigned a drive letter by the OS; or spins up and seems to work, except that no files seem visible in File Manager or your OS’s equivalent.

Help for each of those cases is covered in an earlier post, “How do I recover data from an undetectable external hard drive?

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