Hi all,

First post so please forgive my ignorance. I have a WD120EMFZ-11A6JA0 3.5" sata drive. Recently it was accidentally unplugged whilst running and the data on it is now inaccesible.

When plugged into a windows machine it appears in disk management, reporting its correct capacity as unallocated, and as disk not initialized. The initialize disk operation returns an error of 'Data Error (cyclic redundancy check).

Crystal DiskMark reports the following:


https://ibb.co/ymN8sQ0f

I tried using diskpart to clear disk read attributes, but that failed. I also tried using sea tools to perform a short self test but that also failed, although it too can see all the details of the hard drive correctly.

Any advice on if/how this drive could be saved would be appreciated, the cost of it is not insignificant to me.

Thanks

Maybe the filesystem was corrupted and you can use a software recovery. Do you know if its NTFS or FAT?

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Zero Alpha: zeroalpha.com.au
Find Cheap Donor Drives App: https://www.zeroalpha.com.au/donor-drive-app Updated February 2026

Unfortunately I havent had any luck with the software I've got.

I cant remember which program i used for this test, but it was identifying every single block as bad when i tried to scan the drive. it may have been Seatools. It's not the end of the world if I can't get the data back, but if I can save the drive, that would be really useful. It's out of warranty so no opportunity to send back.

Are you trying to recover the data or reuse it - How are connecting the drive and does it remain spinning?

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

No access and all sectors bad is a well known error on that family of drives. Advise to scrap the drive, it will never be reliable anymore.

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Digitalsupport Data Recovery
https://digitalsupport.dk

I'm connecting directly to the motherboard via sata and I believe it does remain spinning. I'm more concerned with reusing it.

If the data isn't important- take it on the chin and accept the loss, there's very little that can be done with helium drives even with pro tools.

_________________
Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

Understood, thank you all for your advice. I was hopeful that it might be salvageable, but now appreciate that it is not.

It can be done, data recoverable. This is SA (FW issue) typical for them.

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Angel Data Recovery

The data isn't critical, is the cost of repair likely to outweigh replacing it? Thanks