Please Help: Steps for Saving Data off a Dead Hard Drive

[mavs-fan]

I have a Western Digital Green 2.0 tb drive (WD20EARX) that's nearly two years old. It's covered under WD's warranty for 2 years.

The bad news is that the drive suddenly stopped working. There were no clicking sounds or unusual noises, it just stopped. My hunch is that the drive might have stopped working due to a power surge but that's just a guess.

I tried seeing if the drive's partition structure might be corrupted, however, it's not seen under disk management at all in Windows so this seems to point to a hardware problem.

I really need some of the data off the drive and am trying to go through my next steps. The drive has been removed from the computer and is in a working SATA caddy. I've tried tapping the drive and it appears to not be spinning upon boot.

I've read that freezing the drive (in two double sealed ziplock bags may bring it back temporarily) and I've read about replacing the circuit board which is something I've never done before.

The good news is that I bought two of these drive at the same time. They have the same manufacture dates and the same model numbers. I don't know if the firmware in the boards are tied to a particular drive or not.

Let me know your thoughts if I should try the freezer method next, the circuit board swap or something else.

Thanks for the help.

[lcoughey]

If your data is worth $350 or more, get it assessed by a data recovery professional before you make it worse.

Don't bother freezing the drive...it won't do anything.

[mavs-fan]

Luke,

Thank you for the response. While the data is greatly needed, I'm probably not going to pay upwards of $100 to retrieve it.

I think I'm going to try switching out the circuit boards on the two identical drives purchased at the same time if there's a chance this will work. I welcome any advice more experienced folks here have as this is something I've never done previously in more than 25+ years working with computers.

My understanding is that I need to gently loosen the Torx screws on the bottom of the board and that there's a ribbon cable inside connecting the board to the drive. Is the ribbon usually easy to remove? Any pics or videos of this process would be quite helpful.

Thank you all for the help and detailed advice.

[sknopp]

Most likely the TVS diode has shorted. Search here on the forum for 'tvs diode'. If it is a TVS issue, make sure to use a good, regulated power supply.

[mavs-fan]

We're still considering swapping out the circuit boards on the two identical drives.

I also found these guys, Outsource Data Recovery in Ohio. If the problem is the board they'll fix it for $60, including return shipping. Does anyone have any experience or knowledge about them? It looks like they've been in business for about a year or so.

http://outsourcedatarecovery.com/hard-d ... r-process/

[mavs-fan]

Thanks for the reply. I think we're going to try a board swap next with the identical hard drive.

I did find a recovery center (Outsourcedatarecovery dot com) in Ohio that will reportedly repair the circuit board for $60. This seems like a good deal. Does anybody here have any experience with them?

[ShaneWard]

If the boards are the same then swapping the boards will show you if the drive will spin up or not, but the drive WILL NOT WORK. just test to see if it spins up. If the drive spins up with the replacement board then there is something wrong with the original board that needs fixing.

You see, you need the original board, or a small memory chip because it contains information on that drive only. Each drive is different and simply swapping the boards will not work.

If the drive spins up okay with the replacement board, then post some high quality images of the defective board here and we can show you what to do next.

[mavs-fan]

Thankfully the board swap worked. I've copied about 1/3 of the drive so far without any problems. Thank you all for the help.

I'll post a pic of the bad board to see if it's salvageable.