The 2 days ago the 320 WD3200AAJS hard drive in my iMac crashed. I tried to un-rar some files and everything seized. Unfortunately, the computer was also running my once a month dual backup (normally I only backup one volume per week, rotating those out) and it corrupted all the data on both backups.

Thus began the saga of the WD3200AAJS. I first thought about a PCB swap because the drive seemed to sound normal when I hooked it up to an external SATA to USB converter. The iMac would only say that the drive couldn't be read and would display a non name 2.2TB drive in Drive Utility. Then, suddenly after taking off the circuit board and replacing it, it began to work again. I was able to recover about 35GB of the 110GB I needed before it stopped working again. This is why I was considering a PCB replacement since it seemed the physical drive still worked. Although I am told that the PCBs on thee drives are "tuned" to their physical hard drive counterpart, and thus swapping is likely to fail.

Then, tonight, I took the drive to my brother who works in IT. When he hooked it up to his Windows machine, it mounted, showed the correct drive space and name. I was able to use HFSExplorer to see the directory structure and even navigate it. But the second I tried to pull data from the drive the program locked up. Next I tried Macdrive 8, it too was able to load the drive as a Windows hard drive, and I was able to navigate. Again, when I tried to move data into my brother's computer it froze. Currently, he is planning to try to use a blind bit-for-bit copy program they have at work to try and recover the data.

Any advice or comments on this? It has me completely baffled how the drive seems to partially work on a Windows machine, and just does nothing on my Mac. Think the bit for bit clone approach might succeed?

Have you read the DIY warning page?

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Probably no. And now many things got worse. The problem was elsewhere right from the start. As data is no longer important, seems, you can experiment some more anyway...

This depends on the setup, but I think is likely that the cloning software will probably be a simple software imager which will probably fail to make the clone, and you could potentially further damage the media.

But if data is not needed then by all means carry on.

But here you need to decide what is more important, the rest of your 110GB of data, or a (potentially unsuccessful) attempt at making a image with basic and un-intelligent image software, probably not capable of dealing with physical failures and hardware errors.

A recommended course of action follows a definitive, accurate diagnosis. You can't have the former without the latter . . .

A strategy for PCB failure is different from bad sectors which differs from firmware issues, etc.

In case that was too arcane, let me put it simply:

DON'T WORK ON THIS DRIVE UNTIL YOU KNOW AND UNDERSTAND HOW IT FAILED.

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