Western Digital My Passport Ultra 1TB USB 3.0 (purchased 2015 I believe)
P/N: WDBZFP0010BBK-05
Drive: WD Blue WD10JMVW-11AJGS2

Wife dropped her HDD and the head began clicking. I had her purchase another drive with the same P/N listed above and the drive that came in it was the same model # but drive did not indicate it was a Blue drive. The PCB on the back side are the same on both.

I took the donor drive's head and swapped it into the old drive. Everything went smooth, but when I plugged it in, it still clicked. I then unplugged it and swapped the PCB's. It spun up and made some noises (no more clicking) but never did anything from there.....I'm assuming that's because of the BIOS chip being different on the new PCB. The head would eventually park and the led light blinked non-stop...I let it run overnight to see if it would do anything but never did. I swapped the PCB's one more time and when I plugged it in, the computer recognized it (showed under USB Eject Media icon in lower right corner but didn't assign drive letter or show up under disk management), but it was back to clicking. WD Data Lifeguard didn't recognize it was plugged in either. After all that, I noticed at some point the top head magnetic piece slightly separated, so it's probably bad now.

I found another drive exactly like the one we have and ordered it, but I'm curious if there's anything I should try when I go to swap the heads? I thought it was strange that it clicked after installing the new head. Is it PCB related or something else?

Thanks all! I'm sure my cause is pointless, but we're willing to try anything. Wish I had the money for sending it off but the budget is too tight. The data isn't super critical, but we've got the first 4 months of our 17 month old's life on there and not backed up anywhere else :S.

Well,
Give it To Erkin -> http://www.hddrecovery.ca/contact-us/ .You Can Tell Him i " amarbir " Referred You To Him

_________________
Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

Stop playing with it, it will not help. If a pro recovery is out of your budget atm do it later: Drive was dropped, it might have severe physical damages (platter, firmware, heads), nothing you can do but make it worse.

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030 Datenrettung Berlin GmbH (Germany)
HDD, SSD, NAS, RAID Datenrettung - 030-datenrettung.de

Well,
i am amazed PCN that more and more people are playing with their drives ,This is Due to youtube and some stupid videos on that website .I have created 2 video till today on this subject

Why you should not unstuck stuck heads yourself -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F0XjzuKzgY
Stop giving data recovery cases to computer shops -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EYR4PiKOIo

PS : But i think i need to make another one where i educate actual clients not to try physical cases themselves ,Its a Bad Situation

_________________
Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

I completely understand the consequences of opening the drive and that it's the worst thing to do. I'm not overly concerned with the data on the drive, it's simply a side project/challenge for me. I've told my wife it's screwed at this point regardless. I don't and won't ever have the means of sending it off for a professional repair....what we are attempting to save just isn't worth it.

With that said, I'm just trying to find a logical answer as to why a head from a donor drive would also click like the other. Is there a relationship between the head and the firmware/service area on the drive? In my mind, I see the head as a simple mechanical part and the real "talk" between the parts is the PCB and the information on the drive itself... Does that make sense?

I've swapped heads on Seagate drives before and had success and was able to retrieve data off for customers. Yes, I told them the risk and that the chances of recovering anything was next to nil, but it has worked for me in the past. Perhaps Western Digital has something else going on that the Seagate's didn't. That's what I'm trying to figure out, simply if I'm overlooking something.

+1 Amabir. The fact thread starter has not made routine recent reliable clones or backups indicate it is high time to send this hard-drive to a DR company/specialist when monies are available. Home DIY attempts often make things worse.

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"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin revisited

I have had success with Seagate drives in the past. I tried to post something earlier but said it won't post until admin reviews...

It is highly likely that there are firmware issues and possibly media damage in the service tracks. Most labs will connect the drive to a PC3000 system, after swapping the heads, and then try to fix the firmware damage in order to get the drive to ID. You may want to venture over to hddoracle where you can see if there are some free ways to do this.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Well,
Might be in USA its expensive not here in india ,For a Head Swap And Recovery of Clients Data We People Typically Charge Rs :21,600/- .Including Cost of The donor .This Amounts To 335/- USD .Well You Heard That Correct .We Not Only Have The Same Lab Infrastructure As Your American Data Recovery Professionals Around Here And Typically We Can Handle 99.9% of The Cases .So Your Point Is Not Valid About Pricing No 1 ,No 2 You Got a Drive Working One Time Will Not Mean You Can Get It Done Again .If you are bent upon in doing what you are doing then swap the heads back to the donor you took out heads from and if that clicks then you have $%#$^#^ the heads Because its takes months and days of practice to perfect the technique and also you need to have proper lab environment and also Tools For This Process .This is a Fblite Series HDD With 2 Platters and 4 Heads

_________________
Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

A dropped drive, DIY is not a good choice.

These WD drives, if you swap heads with a different areal density, it will most like scratch the media, the description suggest that donor drive is not compatible, this can be confirmed if you list here the complete detail from both patient and donor drives.

Again, DIY on the dropped drive the chances of success are not very promising (no offense), there are further things to be addressed after swapping heads, patching FW, adapting a Sata PCB, deal with encryption etc. The best is to keep the drive safe and make a budget for it, there are cheap options available if you are willing to send drive out of US.

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Data Recovery Pakistan

Yes for older drives, no for newer and new drives.
Both, WD and Seagate have certain unique parameters that often are necessary to be mindful of. Otherwise, it leads to head scratching sessions like you are experiencing.

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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

Look like the SA got scratches when the drive was first power up after the dropped. So even after mwc104 x-swapped with a new head the click sound still exist, the drive was unable to perform initialization during the spin up routine.

@mwc104 when next doner arrives,
Take heads out of doner
Put them back in doner
Check if doner is still working
If still working you know your cleanroom, tools and procedure is working
Proceed with patient drive

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Digitalsupport Data Recovery
https://digitalsupport.dk

I had some success with seagates too...

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Alright, i'm finally back...

The new donor drive came in and the serial and other manufacturer numbers were very close to the original drive. I purchased a cheap plastic/nylon head tool and I swapped it over. The drive spins up and I can hear the heads moving. This time around, the drive actually shows up in the WD Drive Utilities AND under Windows Disk Management, however, the drive is reading as a RAW drive now....it doesn't show any drive capacity.

Also, when I go to Disk Management, it prompts me to initialize the usb hard drive. None of this happened during the last head swap. What would you suggest I do from here? I would initialize and then try some kind of data recovery software, but since you guys are way more experienced I'll wait to hear from you.

Thanks for taking the time to assist me.

Just out of curiosity, I downloaded and ran iCare Recovery Pro and ran the scan for Lost Partition Recovery and it ran in 2 seconds and had nothing to report back. Don't know if that software is any good, but wanted you guys to know this info. Hopefully it doesn't mean much and you all have a better option to try.

glad you made this far.

if drive is spinning fine with absolutely no abnormal sound, you should search slow fix here and apply it, keep in mind the best is to clone the drive sector by sector to another drive to safe extract data, the drive may hang if you continue to copy data through normal means.

good luck

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Data Recovery Pakistan

Thanks for the reply! I do have another 1TB external drive I can clone to .

I searched for the "slow fix" and one of the recommendations was to try WDMarvel (I don't have linux so I couldn't try hddsupertool). Started up the WDMarvel tool and only my internal SATA drives show up in the list. It claims it supports USB drives...

I'm assuming I need a USB --> SATA adapter or something like that?

I think it does support USB drives, BTW i can help you remotely if you want.

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Data Recovery Pakistan