Hi,

I had the above WD 320gb PATA drive in a Mac G4 that crashed in April. I tried various DIY 'fixes' like freezing, etc (I know now that this technique is frowned upon by many). Though the data is important, it's not $3000 important (clean room quoted price). I did have it looked at by 2 data recovery ops who could not access the data via software.

Attempting a fix, I purchased an identical HD motherboard, swapped it and attached the drive via a HD - USB cable. Previously, the drive would attempt to get to speed, faintly click, then power down. With the swapped MB it gets up to speed and stays there, and sounds like it's accessing data (or whatever the normal HD sound is) but it does not mount.

Suggestions? thanks.

The drive probably needs a new set of heads and alignment issues are a problem with this drive. Contact user Jojo-ats here on the forum. He is an authorized WD repair center. He does good work and his fee's are reasonable. member5276.html

You could do a little more research about ROM, adaptive data, unique data, etc. on the forum.

Or take prior recommendation.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Try shining up the preamp connection pads with a soft white pencil eraser. This will remove any oxidisation.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.