My Passport is not recognized by PC

I was uploading files to my drive and it fell off the bed and struck the wooden sideboard. The drive seemed ok at first, meaning no odd noises. The copy process ended and the pc was no longer able to read the drive. After this no computer was able to see files on the drive or even recognize it as a lettered storage device. I plugged it into a different pc and it recognized it and started the driver install process. It was able to install one one of the drivers but the last driver failed to install and it seemed to hang during this part of the installation. I ran the Western Digital Data LifeGuard quick test and the test came back with a passing result but with a capacity of 0.00 GB…a little small for a 1TB drive. I ran a bood disc diagnostic and it found that the drive was “not ready” and that it was unable to read sector 0.

While plugged in the drive spins normally, I can hear and feel the spinning. The indicator LED is blinking rhythmicly at a rate of about 3x a second. Any ideas before I mail this thing off and somehow find $1500 to have this thing manually recovered?

P.S. I know, I should have backed up. I was actually in the process of doing that. I stupidly moved all my photos from the past decade to one spot (this hard drive) so I could begin the mass upload process to a photo website all at once. Sigh…

Usually when a drive gets dropped it’s beyond home solutions and requires professional data recovery. If you are considering professional data recovery the less you do the better your chances are.

Joe