DVR, HDD...Which one is broken?

HDD Western Digital 1.0T Sata 32mb Cache (WD1001fals)
DVR Alhua Technology DVR0404LE-A 4 channel.


Basically I dropped this bad boy 6 feet and now the DVR says the HDD is not reading. Now I get a picture fed through the DVR, and I can access the menu and everything, so the DVR seems fine. I see the the disks in the HDD are spinning, so that appears to be fine.

My question now is........How do I figure out what is wrong, and is there a way to fix it. I have had success in the past with this stuff and if you just point me in a direction and some parts, then I will be happy to do my homework and maybe come back with a more intelligent question.

http://i1007.photobucket.com/albums/af199/brahman8908/Chart1-9.png

 

Dropping the device probably caused the write head on the hard drive to hit the platter, causing bad sectors/disc damage. Just because the discs inside the hard drive (platters) platters spin, doesn't mean they are functioning correctly. Try replacing the hard drive with another and that will confirm its the disc.

 

Ahh Sir, I have a problem with money. But let's say it is the Write Head, is there a way to fix this? Bend the Write Head back? Order an individual Platter?

 

Not possible, unless you have a better then surgical grade clean room to open the hard drive in. More likely then the write head would be bad sectors, you might be able to hook it to a pc, format and scan disk it, see if windows can fix the sector damage. If you can find a cheap 20 gig or little hard drive that would also confirm that the drive isn't the damaged part.

 

Did you check to make sure none of the cables were knocked loose? I would certainly do that before spending any money.

 

I saw in your pic that you have an opened HDD. Did you open yours? If so, it's probably bad now even if it wasn't before.

 

If you suspect you have bad sectors here is a link to a softwaree company that will give you a free trial and see if the HD' is recoverable. You will need to slave the dodgy HD to get this software to work of course. I can certainly vouch that it really does works as I recently recovered a bad HD using this software.

http://www.hdd-regenerator.net/

 

If the disc has bad sectors, chances are it will fail again in those same places. Replacement is a better option then recovery, espically in a device such as a security system dvr.