Cocked up hard drive, may have lost 120Gb of MP3's

I have my mp3 hard drive on my floor (mistake no. 1) connected via one of those groovy usb>ide convertor things. works fine, all wonderful. that's what i thought, till i accidentally pushed something off my desk, which landed on that mp3 storing hard drive. since then, it won't actually spin up properly, it makes strange noises, and obviously, won't allow you to copy or play any mp3's from it.

i've opened it up, and could see that the magnetic head on one of the arms was slightly bent, tried to bend it back, but it made no real difference, other than stopping some of that nasty scratchy whining noise it made before. is there some way i can retrieve the goodness that's still on the platters? please, please, please, any advice is massively appreciated!

 

If you opened it up and bent the arm, chances are slim...

 

haha, dead. sorry. NEVER open a drive

lesson learned?

i'm glad i have all my good songs backed up on my ipod....

 

thanks for the helpful replies (!)

a friend of mine had his music 'backed up' on his ipod, and when he installed his ipod on a PC (having been on a mac) it formatted the ipod hard drive. nice going apple...

 

itunes warns you before it does this. that dialog box that popped up?

DON'T CLICK OK!

that's what you get when you OK away dialogs without reading them...

 

i feel your pain.my mp3 player has just gone tits-up. its all backed up(bar my films).

 

and they were all legal too...

 

But you can't get them back onto your PC can you?

 

duhhh, of course you can.

i hate these little things people make up to make themselves feel better about being apple haters.

in a mac, you can just drag the songs from the ipod in itunes to any folder. in windows, i don't think it's as simple but there's a free app called ipod agent which does it for you.

 

On a PC, getting your songs back onto your PC is as simple as showing hidden folders, and then getting ITunes to sort out the weird directory structure (consolidate library does the trick). Simplest thing in the world...

As for the original question, there's nothing you can do especially if you've opened the drive up, even if you got it working again (doubtful, don't drop heavy objects on hard drives in future) the mere spinning of the drive would destroy your data, just a few particles of dust at 7200rpm act like a sanding wheel.