Hi there!

I accidentally dropped my little 30GB portable drive the other day getting out of the car. I was slightly worried but remembered the reassurances of the manufacturers specs that these things could take 500Gs when unpowered and survive. Then I plugged it in and, instead of making the usual 'start up the spindle' whirring sound it made a 'where are my heads' click click sound. No drive appeared on the USB chain. I tried a few different combinations and another machine, but nothing worked - it looks like I've adgered my drive.

It's really only the 100KB or so of source code on the drive that I'd like back; the 20GB of mixes I already have elsewhere. A pity, then, that I hadn't backed it up at all recently.

I looked around for replacement drives and, to my surprise, found exactly the same model of drive still on sale. Hmmm, I thought; maybe I could put the old platter in the new drive and I could get the data off. Of course, the risk of this is that I somehow adger the new mechanism or new platter and therefore end up having paid for two dead drives rather than one. I don't like throwing good money after bad for no result.

So my question is: has anyone else tried this kind of operation? What kind of success have you had from it? Any good pages you'd recommend on how to do it? I've tried searching Google but I mostly get stories about replacing your hard disk in portable players and laptops.

Preparing to write off my work,

Paul