Hi All;

Trying to help a friend here, he has a USB WD My Passport drive (Model: WDBBEP 0010BBK-01), Internally it houses a WD USB HDD model WD10TMVW which is very faulty; since I started to write this post my friend has just confessed that the drive has probably been dropped - Sigh!!
Any how I have some experience in Data recovery but not much in the way of clean room facilities or surface mount soldering equipment, I'm an old school electronics technician who is very capable at handling small electronic devices and soldering etc.
Originally I was investigating the probable have cause for it's failure and read online that quite a lot of these drives suffer from controller board failures but as now it is more probable that the drive heads are physically damaged.
However I understood that a replacement controler board can be bought and if I transplant the chip firmware/BIOS that we may be able to recover the data from the drive; But I'm not sure that the board is the problem, when we connect the drive to a Windows 7 PC it does identify that a new piece of hardware has been connected to a USB port but fails to recognise it as a Drive and or using WDs diagnostic software (Data Lifeguard) this completely fails to acknowledge the connected drive or its model to any degree.
I have recorded the sound from the HDD its self, It is obviously repeatedly attempting to spin up and keeps going through this cycle for a minute or two before giving up. Ironically this forum will not let me upload the short MP3 recording I made

So guys and girls, please advise if this is probably mechanical HDD damage or if possibly replacing the controller board is a likely contender of being the culprit? Or are there any other diagnostic tricks I should try?

I suspect the value of our friends data is less than about USD200 But I'll give him any useful information that you guys can offer.

Thanks in advance.

Jim.

A Dropbox link to the recording I made is here https://www.dropbox.com/s/avbanzx81i9f428/Rec_0005.mp3

Thanks again.

Jim.

Listen to drive carefully, is there any clicking noise ? or beep ?
does drive spin down ? drive fell in working state or it was off ?

Best advise is to take it to a Pro, not a computer repair shop if the data on drive is vital. For sure, your drive has not a controller board problem.

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Data Recovery Pakistan

Update:

I've created an additional post in which I have put a link to Dropbox with a audio file of the sound of the drive, however I have a message from this board indicating that my post has to be reviewed before it will get posted here, so hopefully you'll see bit soon

Head Stiction
Not a DIY: you need a pro to do this job in the clean room.
Good Luck

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Data Recovery Pakistan