Hey guys,

Well, far from a guru, more like a novice with a mystery. After moving to a new apartment, at the bottom of a drawer I found a 250 GB Western Digital 2500 JS external drive, out of its enclosure, just the drive itself. Having no clue what was on it, I thought, hmm, let me try seeing what I had.

I bought one of the Dynex enclosures and slid it in, plugged in the power and USB to computer, and absolutely nothing. No spinning, no noises, no recognition of the drive, nada. So I set it aside for a week or two, and reading some online, I found possibly replacing the logic board would solve powering issues. Since I had no clue what was on it, if anything, thought it would be a good experiment. So I scoured eBay for an donor logic board, and miraculously found out, same model, same serial number. I knew of the problem with matching firmware, etc., but thought I'd give it a shot.

Board came last week and I unscrewed the old one, attached the new one, plugged it back into the Dynex and crossed fingers. Immediately when plugging it in, I heard it start to spin up. It spun for about 5 seconds but then, depressingly, I heard a "CLUNK-CLUNK-CLUNK-CLUNK" and it stopped spinning. It tried to spin up again, but only gave two clunks and did that spin-up, clunk, clunk process about three more times before it just stopped.

The kicker is I mentioned to my mom yesterday about the mystery, and she thinks it's a hard drive sent to her before my dad died with digitized super-8 movies on it that she had done right after he died. I have no clue why it would be a bare drive outside of an enclosure, but this would have been around 2001-2002, so maybe that's what companies sent things back in.

Any hope that a firm would be able to swap platters or potentially get ANY info from the drive? Since I know that can be expensive, just wondering if I should go ahead and write off the drive and data as lost. I did have marginal hope though with the replaced logic board actually had it spinning.

You should move the rom from patient to donor pcb, of course this is possible only if you have the specific equipment.
After rom transfer, if still hear CLUNK-CLUNK noises and goes in spin down, it would mean that there is an internal fault (very likely shorted pre-amp).

To recover data of this drive you will need a pro!

_________________
My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI

@devlon, can you upload a detailed photo of the component side of your board? We may be able to get a better idea of what killed your drive if we can see, or measure, the damage.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.