Hi All,

The usual story for this board, I have a WD Blue Scorpio WD5000BEVT - 75A0RT0 (May 2010) that was functioning in a Sony Vaio that had a tendency to get really hot. The laptop was shaken in a fall, about 40cm, after which Windows 7 failed to respond and I did a reboot. The machine was unable to boot, however the windows boot screen, and boot failure / repair / safety boot options were available, but progressed no further

I removed the drive and put it into a usb 3 usb enclosure. When I plugged it in, the drive sounds like it is spinning up as normal, windows recognises a drive plugged into, installs the drivers, but only manages to recognise the 100mg recovery partition on the disk. After a while, it will recognise another partition, but when I click on it, windows hangs and fails to load it.

The light on the enclosure keeps changing from red to purple, then back to red, and then purple again.. constantly whilst the drive is plugged in.

There is no clicking whilst the drive is plugged in, or any unusual sounds.

So, based on what I'm telling you here, I'm asking for the general consensus of the next best action to recover the data. I've read a bit about replacing the pcb with a functional part, as the drive is quite new, I thought it might be a possible option.

What do you think? Also, located in Australia, so advice on a good value data recovery consultant would be appreciated if this is the conclusion.

Thanks and regards,

Jay

Doesn't sound like there is anything wrong with your PCB. Probably heads or surface damage from the fall, or if you got lucky maybe only some bad sectors. DIY options at this point are limited to attempting to image/clone the drive, but I imagine that will not work (probably would get some small number of sectors into it and then get stuck).

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Try to clone it.
You can use DMDE or HDClone (for free).

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