Hi everybody

I'm having a weird problem with a Western Digital harddrive from a friend of mine.
The other day it started making the infamous 3 clicks and spin-down and the drive itself is identified as a WD ROM Unicorn with a 6.21GiB size.

Searching through the forum indicates it's either bad heads or the heads needs re-alignment, however I'm in doubt.
I've attached an image of the sticker located on the harddrive.

So the question is, what to do and not to do, if there's any chance at all to recover the data.
Any advice is welcome

For your record, I've done a couple of data recoveries before, so I'm not completely lost behind the truck

My apologies if you find the question dumb, I'm new on this forum.

Thanks in advance.
Best regards
Glenn

Hi,

You are right about one thing, most probably you got heads issue on your drive.

If you are not experienced in making head swaps, I think you don't have much chances as this ones are very tricky to do.
But if servo is not stuffed there's a good chance of recovery.

This model could be very tough to recover data from.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

Do not open the cover. Need a proper diagnosis first to determine that it is a heads issue and potentially how many. If you open the cover, then it is hard to say what is going on for sure.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

What Labtech said.

Could be a logic board issue too ...

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

My vote on heads, this is not DIY...sorry to say, maby 2% on logicboard.
Where you from?

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

I've spoken with my friend today and he told me that about a week ago that the computer lost the connection with the disk and it started clicking, but after a couple of reboots it came back, until the issue described in the initial post happened.

I know head swapping is very tricky, like working with a complex clockwork. However i have done one successful headswap on a seagate once.
As i can understand from other forum threads, WD has chosen to make an utterly dumb design decision regarding a screw through the cover to align the heads, so i need to realign if i do a headswap.

I'm going to source a donor drive. According to the DCM code, the donor drive needs to have NT in its dcm or am i missing a point here ?


mr_spokk: I'm located in Denmark currently

I do not beleive DCM as an indication for head compaitibility.

what's used to identify head compatibility then ?

head swap needs more experience and as they mentioned here tricky

my advice seek a pro on this if you decided

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Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

We often see a combination failure -- a bad logic board and bad heads. If the small components located below the Smooth motor chip (on the PCB) are burning hot, then the preamp is shot too. Of the failures that we see with the Mammoth / Unicorn / Saber series, I'd guess the dual failure may run as high 15-20%. YMMV.

Sounds like this fellow has an alignment issue or dirty heads.

Jon

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

What Jon said is totally right. A lot of times we got a combination of failures.