Just had TWO boot drives fail within days of each other on separate machines. They had been each other's backup, so I am seriously screwed here.

Neither seems to be a physical problem. No clicking, drive spins. Instead I get crappy handshaking with BIOS. One drive presents its ID number, but errors out. The other drive will not even do that, but does create a pause while the BIOS checks its connector until it times out. If I move it the BIOS checks the new connection, so it sees something, though not much.

Based on other posts I read here I put MHDD on a boot CD and took a look.


My WDC WD5000AAKS-00C8A0 died during a power glitch. It shows Drive ready and Drive Seek Complete, but if I try to check the parameters I get Error, Abort. It reports nothing else.

The second drive seems to have died after behaving intermittently. I thought it was a loose connection since it seemed appear first when I moved the box and went away when I reseated the cables, but it seems the drive was actually going bad. SMART read good the last time it booted (yesterday).
It is a WDC WD1001FALS-00E8B0. It does not always show up on the list of drives, as if it was intermittently connected. If I try to check the parameters I either get an error similar to above or MHDD hangs.

The second drive is under warranty but I am stuck needing data recovery. I wish I could get it working one more time so I could just copy its image. Alas it seems that opportunity has passed. Might it be possible to recover anything with a soldering iron?

This is a duplicate. I guess the topic got held up in moderation or something.