Hi, first off I want to say I'm new here and have nothing but respect for the true DR pros. I have a HDD mystery that may intrigue some of you DR gurus, and maybe someday will help someone in the same boat as me. I'll try to make it short and to the point.

DRIVE: One year old re-certified 750gb WD Scorpio Black-WD7500BPKX from New Egg
OS: Mac OSX 10.6.8 with Parallels XP image 650gb of 750 used

PROBLEM: Was just watching a video and all of a sudden got a spinning ball hang which forced a hard restart. Screen came up as empty OS (folder with question mark)
took the drive out and ran disk utility via USB. (invalid node structure) (no boot partition)
Drive was recognized and spinning. No unusual sound, just not mountable.

Took it to nearest computer repair shop. They first tried to image the full 650gb drive with older Linux DD and about half way through hit bad sectors which slowed reads down. I got the impression they did not want to take up much time on their bench so I think they just ended up using Photorec or R Studio to recover files (approx 300gb of 650) There were two recovered folders (found files) All these were correctly labeled and proper size and (reconstructed files) These were mostly audio files that had no names, strangely some were bits and pieces of audio from different songs combined into one file.

Anyway as I was going through the audio files and I noticed that many of them would not open in Itunes or would end abruptly. As I was scrolling through the 2tb WD My Passport recovery drive the mp3 tags were VERY slowly being recognized (turning black from white) I still don't what causes that, or if it is even something that can be repaired. I just assumed these were probably corrupt files because of the damaged OSX filesystem.

So the main question I have is, for this type of WD drive what are the main suspects? I realize the drive was a factory refurb, but it should have lasted more than one year as a main mac laptop drive. Never had the usual slow downs, just a few random kernel panics in Chrome.
I took the pc board off and discovered that some of the solder joints looked heat worn, I was a Navy aviation electronics tech and know what bad lead free solder runs look like. (see attached pic)

Could heat damage to the pcb have been the culprit all along even though the drive spun up and was recognized for awhile?
The drive doesn't power up at all now. I spent a lot of money on the local recovery and am disappointed they couldn't help me more. I'd like to try a pcb donor swap just to see if the drive will power up again at least. I have enough I level soldering skill to swap the 8 pin U12 rom chip if necessary. I'd at least like to try.

thank you for your time

No need to solder U12.
Do not go to fortunetellers.
It has scratches on the plates.
That may have turned into a gash.
And now the dead heads.
To try to deduct the information, need to change the heads.

Trouble is, you took it to a PC repair shop rather than a data recovery company.

Not that it's your fault, they probably told you they could do it with no problems.

Obviously they didn't have the skills and/or tools to recover your data, yet ploughed on regardless with DIY software, killing your drive

As Tomset says, it's now a physical issue and will require cleanroom work and will,be pretty expensive.

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When you say that the drive doesn't power up, do you mean that it doesn't spin up, or do you mean that it spins up but is not detected?

If it doesn't spin up, I could help you confirm whether the PCB is bad rather than the preamp, as Tomset appears to be suggesting. Do you still have your multimeter?

Did the drive make any bad noises before it died, eg clicking, grinding?

BTW, the oxidisation that you have identified is not important. Examine the component side of the board instead.

Oxidisation on Western Digital PCBs:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php? ... 649&p=1789

I would also check the SMART report for the 2TB Passport drive, just to be sure that it is not failing.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

If they were able to image up to a point before it starting hitting bad sectors, then they ran data recovery software against the drive (most unethical thing to do), the issue is read/write heads and/or platter damage. 100%

Unfortunately their process was just dead wrong, and they killed it. No need to look at the PCB, it isn't your issue. If data is important and worth more than a few hundred dollars, stop messing around and get it to a professional (not a PC repair guy, someone with DR tools).

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