I have a Western Digital WD7500AACS 750GB green drive that came from an external USB enclosure. The person tells me the enclosure was dropped a few times, and the last time the drive wouldn't recognize in Windows.

He pulled the drive out of the enclosure and gave it to me to recover the data. When I connect the drive to a USB to SATA adapter, Device Manager shows the drive as a "USB Drive" and shows up as 0MB when looking at the device properties and clicking on Populate on the Volumes tab (IIRC).

When I connect the USB cable to the system, I hear the drive spin up, but when Windows tries to read the capacity, the drive just clicks, spins the drive down and repeats this process once more before the drive stops spinning altogether.

It basically does the same thing when directly connecting the drive to the onboard SATA controller, except the drive doesn't detect when the BIOS scans through all SATA ports.

I tried leaving the drive in a sealed plastic freezer bag for an hour and had no luck. I'm going to try leaving the drive in the freezer overnight and try it in the morning.

Any other suggestions, tips, or software to try?

Not another "freezer" sucker?

It WILL NOT WORK!!

The drive 99.99% certainly has bad heads and a good chance of platter damage.

This is not a DIY case, sorry to say.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Don't freeze the drive - condensation can form- freeze - and cause more damage to the surfaces. Even in the bag, the air in the drive and the bag have whatever the ambient moisture was, and will condense out to the metal surfaces.

that is not true
Physics doesn't work this way

_________________
SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

Not true but there's some truth on the statement, because many drive manufacturers state that extreme temp. delta and exposure to moistened environment can produce a reaction in the platter surface lubricant layer. I trust what they say and anyway the freezer thing is absolutely bullshit. PERIOD

Hmm...I wasn't aware freezing the drive wouldn't work. I've read that in so many places. It seems like this is a good forum for HDD issues. I'm glad I found it!

So I tried the drive this morning and I had no luck. =(
Is there no way to safely swap the heads?

I won't be able to charge the person because I couldn't recover anything.

Can you guys recommend any "more advanced" data recovery centers? Such as Ontrack or does Western Digital have a recovery team?

The WD website has links to a handful of large commercial data recovery places. If you're not experienced with heads and internal HD work, this is not the drive to learn on

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

These drives are PITA (Pain In The Ass) even for us seasoned people...

How so exactly?

Because of the technical difficulties during DR on these drives.