I am a computer tech, and have run my company for 10 years now. I have generally recovered data from drives that had errors other than the physical - formatted drive, corrupted tables, etc, but I send off more damaged drives to a professional place that costs $1200. Today I have a drive that is not really of high value, so i decided to try to do further recovery, just to see how hard it is. Of course, it's harder than I hoped.

The drive is clicking at spin-up, and then powering down. I was optimistic when I saw some videos that I could pull off the cover and find a head stuck to the platter, fix it, and be golden. Opened it, but the head was not stuck. Strike one. Option two was the logic board. I happened to have a matching board on another old drive, so I swapped them which was amazingly easy, and fired it up. Strike two. So now I'm out of options as far as I can see it. I did fire up the drive with the cover off (I know that's not a great idea, but how else can you get into on what's really wrong?) and took a video. You can see what it's doing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qmOLe0RaPU

I did try manually moving the heads past the point where they go no further, toward the center of the drive, but that does not change the behavior when it is fired up.

Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

If the data on that drive is still needed then better trust it to a professional data recovery service facility. In that way, you could relieve your headache from trying to figure out things that is beyond your limits.

_________________
Encryption is a powerful defensive weapon for free people.
It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless
of who is running the government - E. Dyson

As I said in my original post, the data on the drive is not really valuable. That's why I'm trying to save it myself. Do you have any suggestions about what there is to try next?

If it's not about the infamous CC issue then I would suggest to force re-power on, say, via HDAT2 /W.
For what it's worth, a 'dead' HDD turned on and out to be quite alright, but was affected by PUIS mode and controller incompatibility.

Good luck, anyway)

I must to say the most probably here is heads badly. Correct donnor needed, clean room and skills.

hello cameronjpu,

could you post patient and donor drive(model, part no, site and production date)