Hi all,

I'm looking for help diagnosing a failed WD1500ADFD Raptor drive. Here's what I know so far:

The Situation

• The failure occurred after a pinched PSU cable, likely causing a short - possibly on the 12V rail.
• The drive spins up, and I can feel it vibrating when powered.
• There are no clicking sounds, no abnormal noises.
• However, it is not detected in BIOS and does not appear as a connected device.

What I’ve Checked

• PSU power is confirmed good (12V and 5V clean at the source).
• No visible damage on the PCB.
• Previously removed a TVS diode (D3 on the 5V line), but diode tested good - probably didn’t need to be removed.
• D4 (on the 12V line) tests good in diode mode: ~600mV one way, open the other.
• No shorts on the 12V input pins at the SATA power connector.
• Drive stays spinning and does not click or power down, but is not seen by BIOS.

What I Suspect

• Possibly a blown 0-ohm resistor, fuse, or trace on the 12V line, causing partial power loss.
• Potential damage to the preamp or motor driver IC (Smooth chip), preventing full initialization.
• Haven’t done a ROM dump or PCB swap yet, but it’s on the table.

Image of PCB


Looking for Advice

• What components typically fail on these boards in a 12V short?
• What else should I test before attempting a ROM transfer?
• Could partial 12V loss explain vibration/spin-up but no detection?

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to read and help. Really appreciate the expertise here.

D3 and D4 are Schottky rectifiers. They are not TVS diodes. You must NOT operate the drive without them. Serious damage to the MCU or other chips may result. That's because these are the freewheel diodes in switchmode converters.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know any better at the time and confused it with posts about removing the D3 diode. I’ve powered the drive a couple of times since then.

The good news is nothing critical was lost - just my time and the cost of a replacement, which is already on the way. Still, I’d hate to see this drive go to waste if there’s any chance of recovering it.

That's it.

That's why the drive spin up normally but not detected.

Since this was happening even before I removed D3, it seems like the MCU or another chip was already toast. Is it even worth getting a chip clip and programmer to dump the U12 BIOS and transfer it to the replacement board as a donor? It’d save me about a week’s worth of setup and config, but it’s not the end of the world. I've been meaning to pick up a programmer anyway.

The problem is most likely internal, ie not PCB related.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I would recommend connecting the drive directly to motherboard supports PIO mode and running MHDD or Victoria and post the drive ATA registers behavior.

This would tell us if it is an internal problem (FW, Head/s...etc) or a PCB related issue.

Is PIO mode on a SATA drive even a thing? I’ve never heard of that.

Small update: I soldered D3 back on and moved the drive to the onboard Promise controller (instead of the VIA one), which let me enable IDE mode in the BIOS. The drive is now detected! I booted into Hiren’s and tried both tools, but neither seems to recognize the drive. Maybe there are some advanced commands I need to try - or the drive is just toast.

The replacement drive showed up, but it had so many bad sectors it was unusable. So I went ahead with the BIOS swap, but the result is almost the same: the drive spins up but isn’t detected. The only difference now is that it eventually spins down. End of the road?

I have a similar problem. I have a Western Digital WD2003FYYS 2TB disk drive. It spins up and I can see the OS looking at it (via the blinky lights!) but I can not access it. The reason I am posting is - in Disk Manager - can you see your hard drive? I can see mine but Disk Manager originally said it was Offline. I changed that to Online. Then Disk Manager said the disk drive was uninitalized. Tried initializing it as GPT - but no good. MBR is the same way.

For me, the disk drive has a scratch on the surface of the hard drive. So I wonder if it is the same with you.

For any HDD Gurus out there - my symptoms are similar.

1. Drive can power up.
2. Drive can spin up.
3. Disk Manager can see the drive
4. SOME programs can see the drive as well - but none of them will read/write to it.
5. Disk Manager can not initialize the hard drive.

Is there a way to access the hard drive BESIDES going through the normal Windows OS? If so - this might be the answer to both of our problems. I am not sure but the original poster might mainly want to get everything off of the hard drive. That's what I want to do.

Ah. One last note. Putting on gloves, face mask, googles, turning off the a/c, buying an airbrush with compressor, I opened the disk drive's cover, removed all of the glue trail, spun up the hard drive. The read/write heads do move and try to read the platters. On the platters is a scratch down the center of the platter. I sent the drive off to 300DDR. They took one look and said it would be impossible to recover the hard drive. Being the ever so ready optimist I know there has to be a way to get everything off of the hard drive. I just haven't figured it out yet. You can call me stupid if you want but I know there has to be a way. I am thinking a standalone unit that ignores any OS kind of a thing and just does a dump, bit by bit, from the damaged hard drive to a good hard drive. When done - the good hard drive could then have some kind of a program (like Disk Drill, FileScavenge, Victoria, etc...) and recover files.

Let me know what you think.

Oh yes - I also just recently purchased a Star Tech disk copier. It too comes up with a red light for the damaged disk drive which I think means that it probably contains an OS (like Linux) and is running into the same problems. Just a FYI.

These pads on your PCB are badly corroded, did you clean them properly and tester for continuity?

I had a 2,5" drive for repairs, with corroded pads just like yours. Drive was clicking. I do not remember now was it visible in bios or not.

If pads are in such poor condition, then both pcb pads and connector spring pins must be always cleaned properly, before you move on.

I would suggest abandoning the disk and get a SATA SSD which is dramatically faster. SSD prices for SATA models are reasonable.

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Orico DS500C3-US-BK 5-disk 3.5" SATA, iTGZ 4x M.2 2280 Thunderbolt enclosure NVMe/SATA, etc. etc.

@hardcore Games:

A few things to consider. I bought two SSD drives a few years back. Both died by lightning damage (like the HDD one I'm still working on). Those SSD drives were just gone. My bad luck but I stay away from SSD drives now because a magnetic drive you might be able to get back up and running again. (Like what I am trying to do.) Have you ever had one die on you before?

7-zip. 7-zip is fantastic but there are some things to keep in mind. First, the 7-zip format (ie: .7z) is unstable. I was trying out 7-zip's ability to make .7z files and every file became corrupted. I also tried using 7-zip to make TAR files. These became corrupted also. And before you say anything - latest version of 7-zip. I was looking at what the best archiving programs were like. None of the ZIP files I made via 7-zip have ever had anything wrong with them. So I am like "Eh???" but yes - 7-zip managed to muck up the .7z and .TAR files.

Recently I have tried the XZ archive file format. It seems to work. Interestingly 7-zip will unXZ the files.

I have also tried the GZip and BZip2 archive formats. They work and 7-zip can unarchive those also.

Lastly, I have tried the Unix TAR program fom Gnu which can GZip the TAR file automatically. Both the TAR program and 7-zip will unGZip the files but 7-zip leaves the TAR file whereas the TAR file will both unGZip the files and restore them.

So I have mixed feelings about 7-zip and am thinking of going with the Gnu TAR command using the "tar -czvf <tarfile name> <what to archive>"

But since I have been burned by both 7-zip and a different TAR program - I'm really leery about using them. The good thing about ZIP is - there are free ZIP file programs out there to correct the ZIP file (including WinRAR I think). For TAR files - there are only paid versions and they do not work all that well. (I've tried three of them.)

Can you let me know which archive formats and programs you like to use? (I know you said 7-zip but any others?) Very interested in learning about what you have encountered.

Back in the day we used to use things like parity files (par2) to ensure compressed file integrity could be recovered if it ever needed to be.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

7zip has nothing to do with the original post, it is mentioned in HardCore's signature. (... what's the point in mentioning such thing in the singature btw?)
my oppinion (if it counts):
i found 7zip very inconvenient when peeking into archives and viewing one small file in a large archive in totalcommander (the problem can be reduced to extracting one file from an archive, i did not try that with an unpacker) It seems like the whole archive is traversed during this process, which makes it dazzling slow. ...or i am impatient.
That's why i prefer using rar archives, which are slightly less dense but can be handled more conveniently. Rar also supports adding a recovery record of arbitrary size (i use 2%), which may add an extra amount of robustness.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

I use 7-zip and TAR files which are legible to even Windows explorer. 7-zip is far faster.

TAR files are not compressed which matter little in the age of 30TB hard disks. I find TAR files can be copied easily as large single files are faster than a bunch of small files.

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Orico DS500C3-US-BK 5-disk 3.5" SATA, iTGZ 4x M.2 2280 Thunderbolt enclosure NVMe/SATA, etc. etc.