Help with WD10EADS

[LLL321]

A friend of mine has an external hard drive that crashed on him. While attempting to figure out what's wrong with it, I came across this site after some intense googling. I've included some audio of the noise the drive makes when powering up and an image of the label on the HDD for all make/model info. The audio didn't come out that great so if I need another recording, please let me know. Any help and/or advice with this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

(spins up, clicks can be heard followed by a pause, then a few more clicks, then it spins down).

http://i.imgur.com/eClcrld.jpg?1

[mr_spokk]

Hi, and welcome.
Most likely head problem, very common on those drives.
If your friend need the information, he need to go to a data recovery company.

Bosse

[LLL321]

Thank you for the reply. I came here because that's what I was trying to figure out. Replacing the heads of a drive would require it to be opened up, which would require a clean room to keep the drive safe during the head replacement, correct? So, not really a "do it yourself" kind of job then? I'm assuming that this kind of work is expensive relative to what's on the drive. He'd like to get it back but it's not life ending.

[Nick_CT]

It depends how you define expensive. If the data on the drive is worth the recovery fee, I wouldn't say it's expensive.
Correct, a headswap is definitely not a DIY project.