Quick recap: I knocked my book over. I DID NOT knock if OFF of anything. It went from being upright to being on its side, not having fallen from any height since it was on the floor already.
I was watching some videos at the time, and the video I had playing seemed no longer to work, though others would still play.
After attempting to reboot, my linux laptop could not mount the drive, and my windows desktop recognized it but told me it was 500 gigs of unformatted space.
The drive spins up just fine, and I can hear the head going back and forth a lot (more than it used to). I tried using smartmontools to have the drive run a self-test but smartmontools reported that the drive is not SMART-capable which I found surprising.
This is a users forum not a tech support forum. It may have been damaged it just knocking it over. I lay all of mine on their side. Maybe some recovery software will help.
Keep in mind that the spinning disk is a powerful gyroscope, and the heads ‘fly’ over the magnetic surface on a very thin film of air at thousands of feet per second! While the drive is off, the heads might be parked safely away from the disk, but but while being read (watching a video file) even ‘minor’ bumps or even sudden tipping, can cause the heads to scrape the data film and the read head, destroying at least that file that was gouged. (That’s why you should not move a powered computer, and good laptops have ‘falling’ detection.) If the damaged surfaces are still smooth enough, the file index system might be able to get at the rest of the disk, and might have tried to ‘work around’ the missing areas. If the index (format) was damaged, the rest of the data will be very difficult, or impossible to access. You might try to copy all to another drive, & there are programs & companies with the expertise to at least try to recover some of the remaining data. Good luck Backup is a constant chore.
