You may be in luck.

If the drive itself is fried, as is the normal case of panic and terror, you are screwed if you did not back up.

But if it is merely the connections to the drive, they can take the drive and mount it into another chassis, or repair the connections, so to speak.

From the way you described it, I can't see how the data itself on the drive would have disappeared if you simply dropped it and shattered the housing. This does not sound like "data recovery" which can costs thousands and does not preserve your file structure or names (you will get thousands of files with names like ACXBJGRT7111.jpg--it sounds like you need a new box to put your hard drive in. Maybe.

Electrical shorts and corrupted disks are usually a nightmare, but in this case, I would take the whole thing in to a computer repair place and see what they can do.

I have a guy here in Raleigh who would mount the disk drive in a refurbished chassis with motherboard for about $65 bucks.

Just a thought.

On another note, there is no such thing as "OCD" when it comes to backup. As they say on the Cakewalk forum "if you only have one copy it does not exist."

I am a big proponent of multiple back up. I also like using portable hard drives "like tape" as is mentioned in another forum here. You can get 5 terabytes on a portable for about 100 bucks now. So I will have a "2018" portable drive with all 2018 files (Business, Pics, Music, etc.) that will get copied to another "master drive" which in turn gets copied to another drive. (Kept unplugged in a triple-locked closet with a solid door of course.) It is also nice to keep one master in a fireproof safe or offsite, like in a bank. It does not take long to do this, and again, you can't be too OCD. But again, I think there is a good chance you might be able to rescue that one.


Good luck.

David Snyder
Songwriter/Renaissance Man
Studio + Fingers

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