Potentially Dead WD HDD, HELP!

forgotmyname

You need a board with the same firmware though.

Stick the drive in a plastic bag, Suck all the air out and pop it in the fridge for a couple of hours.

I had this work on one drive, It worked just long enough to recover their data. But literally seconds later it dies again and the fridge and even the freezer trick didnt work again.

I lost a drive full of media and the fridge trick didnt work on that.

macman

lordra wrote: »

Is there any change that changing the PCB will fix it?!

Unlikely, because what you probably have is mechanical failure-so it can't spin up. You can try though, nothing tolose, except the considerable cost of doing so.
Little point in having a backup regime in place and then only running it monthly.

lordra

@forgotmyname: Tried twice! Didn't work, same stuck sound comes out!
@macman: it does sound mech... That regime worked for me for ages....! Guess It'll have to be instant backups then.

Oh well.
Thank you everyone who took the trouble to reply!

closed

did you try horizontal shake before fridging it

Johnmcl7

This is an interesting article to read about attempting hard drive repairs:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7330/hardware-tricks-how-to-not-fix-a-crashed-hard-drive

As other users have mentioned above, it's very difficult to do and if you don't manage to do it correctly it's unlikely anyone will be able to recover data from it.

John

forgotmyname

I now backup all my photo'd and important files to 3 hard drives on 2 different computers.

I had to do a raw search on old hard drives to recover some lost photo's once. That took forever.. Several days without stopping.

I may still have the dead drive. The only thing i didnt try was taking it apart.