hi guys

I have a WD 500gb ide 2008 3.5" hdd which has recently failed (blue screens) in my main base station running xp windows ,when I try to connect it through usb there is a faint clicking sound and windows will no longer discover it (the only prog that does recognise the drive is mini tool partition however it shows up as 2tb =capacity leading me to think its more than a corrupt mbr)

As I am trying to retrieve the data from my faulty drive I have since purchased an identical model which was manufactured one month before my drive (tested & works perfectly) ,now heres where the weirdest thing happens ,when I swap the pcb boards over the failed drive spins up and the clicking has now stopped but it still does not show up in windows and the donor drive which now no longer works anymore has started clicking exactly the same as the faulty drive was ?

please if anybody can shine a light on this weird phenomena I would be eternally grateful

cheers Mike UK

You can't just cold swap the PCB like that on most modern drives. There's adaptive information in the ROM code stored on the PCB that's specific to each individual hard drive. If the PCB number (2060-7xxxx) matches on both boards, you might be able to transfer the ROM which is located at location U12. However don't be surprised if it starts clicking again, usually this is a sign of failed read/write heads or media damage, not a PCB issue.

However if the data is very important, I'd highly recommend that you seek out professional data recovery. It may not cost that much at this point, but if you keep trying things that cost will go up fast.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Sounds like it could either be bad heads, or could be a Tornado drive with bad PCB which sometimes mimics bad heads.

But as data-medics says, you'll have to swap the U12 chip (assuming there is one) over to confirm one way or another. Or if there's no U12 chip then it's quite a bit more difficult if you don't have the right tools.

Happy to do this for you for a token fee

PM me if interested.

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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hi guys thank you so much for replying to my post ..

unfortunately there are no U12 chips on the board the bios is apparentyly on the main chip ..
everything you say makes perfect sense guys I think I need to rethink this mine of a problem before I make it any worse.

Thank you again

hi guys

After posting a cry for help on this forum when my Western digital hdd drive finally packed up with all my v important information on , I am returning to update this thread as I can't thank Sean and Kevin from www.pcimage.co.uk enough! ,after sending my drive to their company in Peterborough not only did they manage to access all my data for me the overall cost was very very reasonable ,they provide an ultra fast service ,a new portable drive to transfer your data onto and everything is handled in a very professional and expert manner...

If your data is important enough to you whatever you do don't try and fix it yourself by opening the drive and following youtube videos (as I was going to do!), the problem may point to a head problem when it could be just bad sectors or a blown board, leave it to the experts they know what their doing and have the spare parts readily available to them and the cost isn't as bad as you may think


Mike

As always, good job Sean

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