Read this before you do anything else
Don't power it on to see if it survived. That test is the risk.
The instinct after a drop is to plug it in and check. On a drive with spinning platters, that check is the most dangerous single action available: if the heads were displaced or the mechanics knocked out of alignment, powering on drives them across the surface holding your files. A drive that was survivable while switched off becomes a head-crash while you watch the progress bar. Whether it was running at the moment of impact matters enormously, and either way the answer comes from inspection, not from another attempt.
Emergency
Dropped laptop
If your laptop has been dropped, the most useful thing on this page is above this paragraph, and it is free. What follows is what the fault usually turns out to be, how recoverable this class of failure is, and what it would cost, including the cases we would tell you to take elsewhere.
What this usually turns out to be
This is the case the whole category exists for, because a dropped laptop is nearly always a running laptop. The drive is rotating and the heads are flying, and modern 2.5-inch drives try to defend against exactly this with a sensor that parks the heads when it detects a fall. That mechanism works well in the fraction of a second it is given, and not at all for a knock off a desk edge. When it fails to park in time the heads contact the platter and the damage is done in the moment of impact rather than afterwards.
2.5-inch drives are built to survive being carried, which means they are also the ones most often dropped while running.
Head assembly displaced or damaged
The likeliest serious outcome when a drive is dropped while running. Powering on afterwards is what turns it into surface damage.
Platter damage from head contact at impact
Where the heads struck the surface during the fall, leaving scoring already present before any power-up.
Nothing at allbetter news
Drives are designed to survive substantial shock while parked and idle. A drop onto carpet while switched off very often does no damage whatsoever.
Cracked solder joint or connector damagebetter news
Common on USB sticks and phones, where the impact is taken by the connector rather than any storage. The memory itself is usually intact.
What to check first on a laptop
- Do not restart it to see if it works. Establish first whether it was on when it fell.
- If it was on and there is any unusual noise, shut it down and leave it down.
- If it seems normal, copy your important files off to another disk now, before doing anything else with the machine. A drive with impact damage often works for a while first.
What not to do
Do not carry on using it because it seems fine. A head that has touched the platter has left debris in a sealed chamber, and the failure that follows is usually days rather than months away. The window in which everything still reads is the window to get the data out, not evidence there is nothing wrong.
How recoverable this is
Governed almost entirely by one question: was it running when it fell? A parked, powered-off drive dropped a short distance frequently survives with nothing wrong at all. A drive dropped while spinning is the harder case, and it gets harder every time it is powered on afterwards. Flash devices and phones fare much better: with no moving parts, a drop usually damages the connector or the board rather than the storage.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- Whether the device was powered on and spinning at the moment of impact
- Whether the impact displaced the heads or damaged the platter surface
- How many times it has been powered on since
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
Assessed free, then referred at no charge
Cleanroom mechanical work
Clicking, seized or head-crashed drives need internal mechanical work in a controlled environment. We don't have one, so we assess it, tell you what we found in writing, and refer it on. That referral costs you nothing here.
Nothing is charged until you have seen a fixed quote for your actual device and agreed to it, and the assessment that produces it is free.
Other faults on a laptop
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.