Hello.

I'm fairly new to this site, however I've read through many posts and found out that verry good support was given !!

There it is...

My Father brought me a old "recently dead" 40Gb HDD full of travel pictures and souvenirs ..... That he would like to recover (not at all costs, he had been warned to do back-ups and he did not.... , however he wants me to look into this and, perhaps, get his precious souvenirs) !!

So I'm trying to get this drive going again, at least for few hours just time required to dump the actual data to another drive. I already tried the freezer trick, without any success. I think I'll go next for the PCB replacement along with the head chip.

however, Before trying to do impossible stuff, I was trying to positively locate the source of the problem.

On power up the drive does not spin, and I hear a clicking noise. After a minute I heard another loud noise (like a deceleration noise) and the platter start turning only 1 turn. I'm just wondering if this could be the motor ?

Anyways, I do not have a spare drive like this one, so I will try to find one on Ebay or perhaps at some store near by.

Any advices ?

Hello,

This is not too clear for me, but i have hints:

WD have unique configuration in the PCB, so simple replacement is most probably useless.
If you want more useful posts, try to record clearly the sound of the drive!

Additionally, try to avoid any power-up attempts, because the problem is unknown now, and you easily can do more problems...
Only turn on the drive once, when you record the sound, and stop it after the sound recording is enough. (about 30 sec)

Information about the failure can be useful too.
It was PS? etc....

Regards,
Janos

It is clear : spin up, click, spin down and so on. 90% heads and/or SA, a small chance for Pcb. Apart the freezer bullshit, diag is 'simple'... Check read channel with a digital storage scope, if you see no proper 'framing' take conclusions. To access SA, you can use either PC3000 or SD. Or ask someone else to do it.

Thanks for your replies.

See attachements for "sound description".

I don't have any equipment to troubleshoot this problem. The fanciest thing I got is a 60 Mhz scope, and again, I understand that I would need clean room, and some other specialised equipments, since I only have average knowledge in electronics, maybe I'lll just forfeit !!

However, I would had liked to try the PCB and SA swap, just for the gut of it...

I had found a drive that matches my P/N, however, I'm a bit reluctent to spend 70$ on a "new-old" drive to be able to recover my data, unless I can have a fairly good chance to make this work again.

Thanks again for your replies.

Regards,

If you are not planning to send the drive to a lab you should open the drive in clean environment and make sure the spindle can rotate freely.

This sound is strange.

I can't hear any rotation sound.
But if you open the drive, probably you getting more far from your data.

Janos

Sa=system area, it's the firmware on the platters. Not swappable!

Sorry about SA, I misunderstood... !

I just had opened the drive, it does not spin on power on. the heads does not move as well, and you can see it doesn't try to spin at all, no perceptible movements on the spindle. I can give a spin to the spindle and it rotates.

After a while, you can see some movements on the spindle, but not a quarter turn.

Either bad PCB or bad motor.
Try to find PCB from a drive of the same MDL.
If still doesn't spin - then it's the motor and there's nothing else you can do by yourself.

not really, the drive does not spin, it doesn't even read the system area. I don't think any pc3000 could help me with this, at this stage

My guess now is 100% mechanical problem.

The spindle tries to rotate and stops. Initially you said that the clicks and hear deceleration noise, so I thought the drive spins up then turn off.
After the news, I think the PCB has problems. Try with a pcb same MDL and see what happens.