Yesterday I tripped over the wire of my external harddrive while it was on and it hit the tiled floor real hard. Now the LED doesn't even go on and it makes a funny sound like its trying to run but can't. In other words its fucked.

I was wondering what the odds are of me salvaging the data on it if I take it out of its case and install it into my desktop computer. Would a 50% chance be a reasonable guess or am I dreaming? Either way its worth a try so I'm gonna give it a shot when I have a bit of time.

I would give it a shot, but I highly doubt it would work. If it won't run at all, then I'm assuming that you can't run any recovery software on it... If the data is extremely important, there's one thing I can think of that may work, but it would be very tedious and painstaking. You could buy the same kind of hard drive, open them both up, and swap out the physical disks inside. You would obviously need an extremely clean environment and would have to be very meticulous, but it's been done before.

Nah the datas not that important at all I even backed a fair bit of it onto DVD's a few weeks ago (although I haven't checked to see if the DVD's burned properly) I just hate to lose a 500GB external harddrive. I definitely wouldn't risk breaking another harddrive to salvage the data but I'm gonna at least install it in my computer and see if it works. Is there any risk of damaging my computer by putting a broken harddrive in it?

Go ahead and opedn it up. Could just be a loose connection inside the case.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyDZLgHvS4E&feature=related

You can buy a laptop to desktop cable to connect it to an IDE connection and power connection in a desktop also.