My 500GB WD Scorpio Blue drive died a few days ago after less than 2 months of service. First I noticed my macbook took an extra minute or so to boot up as it was looking for the drive (had a question mark over a folder) which should have been my first indication. Next, a spreadsheet I was working on got corrupted, and when I restarted, I couldn't get it to boot at all. Instead it would periodically (every 30 sec or so) make a racket of the heads bouncing back and forth rapidly before taking a break and starting again. The drive does spin though. I booted from my old drive over USB and couldn't get the 500GB drive to mount, but could see both the MAC and Windows partitions in Disk Utility, however the MAC one was grayed out.

Luckily, the 60GB drive I migrated from with Carbon Copy Cloner still has most of my work as well as does my RAID mirrored backup drive. What I'm missing is the most recent revisions of some files, all of my music, and other work I've done in the last 2 months. Short story is it isn't worth it to me to pay for data recovery, so I'm trying to fix this at home.

Drive details:
MDL: WD5000BEVT - 00A0RT0
DATE: 30 NOV 2009

So I'm moving forward with the naive hope that it is only the drive electronics that are bad... any thoughts otherwise?

What I've tried so far was to purchase another WD5000BEVT drive (manuf. 05 May 2010) with the intention of swapping electronics as well as an external WD500GB USB drive to hold any salvaged data. I swapped the boards with the new drive with the hope that not much had changed in the electronics between manufacture dates and plugged it into a USB housing. The drive wasn't recognized and Disk Utility seemed to think it was a 2.2TB drive so clearly this wasn't the right path. However, the drive did spin up and didn't make any offensive noises. Comparing the electronics, I looked at the code printed into copper etch under the solder-mask and saw they were different. Realizing I had another WD5000BEVT in the recently purchased USB housing (manuf. Feb. 2010) I opened it up and found that the electronics had matching codes so at least they were generated from the same gerber files. I tried yet another electronics swap, and had the same result as before; the drive wasn't recognized and Disk Utility thought it was a 2.2TB drive.

So, even though I would doubt there is any difference in hardware between the two boards generated from the same gerber files, apparently there was at least a firmware revision for higher capacity drives. If this is true, ideally, I would try and get a matching PCB with the correct firmware loaded and just swap or find a way to reprogram the board I have. Any thoughts on this? Does it even matter which board rev we are on with this drive model? Can someone tell me what information is important from the front label, spindle label, copper etch, silkscreen, barcode on PCB, etc. to determine compatibility between boards?

As a background, I'm an electrical engineer and do some hardware design among many other things at work so I'm not completely out of my element, however, I'm a newbie as far as HDD are concerned.

Thanks in advance.

Hi iceburn,

If you look at the circuitry of your 500BEVT you will see a chip - 88i8845C-XXXX.

Inside this chip is some data which is unique to your drive - "gerber had nothing to do with this".

Regardless of "Gerber" there probably is not another board on this beautiful earth which is the same as yours.

So, your quest for the holy grail will be futile.

btw. it is more likely that your drive is displaying the early stages of physical failure and the more circuit boards your buy and power connect the worse your drive might become.

If you look at your WD drive in the apple you will see a little "apple " logo on the drive.

Swap the electronics over between the drives , and you can kiss both drives good bye.

Be smart....... , get your data off the old drive and put it on the new one, then return the old drive under warranty.

Continue to screw about is going to cost you more money.

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 19

Try to clone your drive using DMDE or HDClone.

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data recovery Poland

Based on your description of behavior, your drive developed some internal problems.
You won't be able to solve them by swapping boards.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

pinkST - I realize that the ROM has been reprogrammed. There are certainly thousands of identical drives to this one in both hardware and firmware; the object is to find one of those that are identical. If if is physical failure, then by what mode to you think?

code_slave - If I could just mount the drive and take the data off I would and warranty away. The data is inaccessible at this point, hence the whole operation. Both of the other drives are just fine (of course using their own electronics) after the attempted swap so that is a non-issue.

laptokowiec - I would, if I could get the drive to mount.. I might even be able to if it would reliably show up as an unmountable partition which I could still image but that's not working either.

harddrivespecialist - What makes this sound like an internal problem to you? Seems to me the heads don't know how to acquire the tracks perhaps? I'm not saying it isn't internal, but what symptoms give you this diagnosis?

Anyone else have some useful insight?

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www.datarecoveryne.com

This conversation is getting circuitous. You aren't actually telling me anything; why does this indicate an internal problem and of what kind?

Come on, harddrivespecialist. Obviously you owe this guy a full fzabkar-style multiple paragraph explanation with links to further reading

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