Hello beautiful people from around the world!

I have a problem which i am searching for an answer and its about a 4TB WD blue hdd, making a click of death (two actually, to be precise) sound.
How it came to this; the disk had 6 partitions and i had windows on multiple partitions.
I almost always made a install on a new partition, so if i would later need some data, i might find it in the old windows folders.
It barely happened and the thing is, you cant just delete these folders later, the explorer doesn’t allow it.
And the computer is not really much in use, so i ignored the random restarts that happened each time I was using it, sometimes the pc would run for a whole hour or more, sometimes it would restart in couple of seconds, meaning where could be two three restarts, before you could start using it.
And I was tired of it and wanted to make i clean install of windows, on a separate ssd, but I was cleaning the thrash from the hdd and removing games and files I don’t need.
I copied the data to another partition and made a format of the partition, that how i also got rid of the windows.old files and folders.
And be the time i did that to the last partition, the explorer froze, and a hear two clicking sounds, after that, the disk stops spinning, starts spinning again, two clicks, stops spinning and so on. one circle of spin, click, click, stop spinning is about 5 seconds long.
I restarted the computer, because I could not get the explorer to run again, but the clicking continued and the drive is not seen by windows, not bios.
Great, and there are a lot of photos from kids, and no backup...
After i tapped it hard for some time, I opened the disk up, nothing there, the heads were in perfect position. there i bought a new (second hand) pcb, with same code and revision, put it on the disk, plugged it in.
The disk did not spin, but it showed up in bios and had 0 data on it. I already googled this beforehand in it was a good sign, i just need to swap the bios chip. The pcb has three almost identical chips, out of which one is the bios.
With the help of work colleagues the bios chip was successfully swapped, but now the tragic part, the disk makes the same clicking sound it did before, the new pcb with old bios chip, is repeating the error.
Is there something else i could do, except give the disk to expensive data recovery specialists (which i made already more expensive, given i already played with the disk)?
should I swap another chip, does anyone know what they do?
Appreciate any help

DISK: WD40EZAZ
PCB: 2060-810011-001 rev P1

Thank you, Ichy

Hello,

- why posting in HddSurgery forum?
- the drive can have head/surface problems and translator issue too, it is hard to distinguish between these for the inexperienced ear.

in either case, it is not something you can solve at home, if the data is important, seek professional help.
swapping the components didn't make it cheaper, same stands for opening the cover.
do not power it up anymore.

pepe

_________________
Adatmentés - Data recovery

Hello,

Where else on the forum should i put it?

Could you please explain the head and translator issues, what need to be done in such cases? Not at home i guess, but what would a professional recovery do?

Thank you.
BR, I

It seems like the topic was moved to the correct forum now.

I see no benefit explaining what a pro would do, it is time consuming and perfectly pointless. We do what's necessary for the actual case to be recovered.


pepe

_________________
Adatmentés - Data recovery

I understand and agree, no need to explain in details, i just wanted to know what would be needed, new heads, a whole similar donor drive...
I have a video recording of the clicks, if you could be able to pinpoint the problem.

Thank you.
BR, I

A few observations, some obvious, some not.

1. The drive most probably belongs to the notorious 'Venicer' family (complete model number will confirm it). This is a challenging family to work with, even for many professionals.
2. Opening the drive was a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE idea.
3. I'm wondering when the 'drive clicks, let's change a PCB' nonsense will end. If the drive spins up, 99.99% the PCB is perfectly fine.
4. Write Protecting the drive is an ABSOLUTE MUST for this family. This means that even if you were able to solve all other problems, you'd hit a hard dead-end with a not-so-happy ending for the data.
5. This is an SMR drive, that manipulates 2nd level translation. Corruption of this -vital- part of the drive causes a behavior similar to the one you described. It's solvable, but it's complex. And opening the drive (and I assume, powering up the drive afterwards) have complicated things a lot.

So, to answer your last question, as pepe said, the drive needs to be correctly handled by someone who knows what they're doing:
Sterilize the internals, WP the drive and then check behavior: If heads are bad, change heads. If 2nd translator is bad, fix this. And so on.

_________________
http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners