Similar post as http://forum.hddguru.com/wd5000aaks-00tma0-strange-t14756.html?hilit=wd5000aask%20clicks#p96471 How ever I have no clicks.

History: I was doing some coping of files between diffrent profiles and I noticed that the harddrive was getting quite hot. The heat from the HDD reflected on the computer casing and I could actually feel the hotspot with my leg. So I decided to switched to a new case after a couple of days.

Some days ago both my primary Samsung disk and my WD got corrupted, reformatted the Samsung and reinstalled XP, and it's working fine. The WD on the other hand... Not so much.

The symptoms and what I have done:
It is detected by the BIOS about 40% of the reboots. Sometimes it seems that it's detected instantly and sometimes it stops at the detection for 30 seconds or so and then it is either found or not.
When it is disabled in BIOS windows starts much faster (several minutes). When enabled windows takes ages to load, more that four minutes.
Even if it is detected by BIOS it can't be detected by Windows or Linux.
At the start of my troubles I once got it detected by Win XP by getting in the Devicemanager and "Check for hardware changes". After that I checked the HDD with HDTune and it first reported 100% bad blocks. Re initiated the scan and it reported back 100% good blocks.
After that I fired up getdataback and started to recover some files, however after 2,5 hours it just said that it couldn't find a NTFS partition.


Some pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.se/epkmack/100NCD90#

Most of the data is already backedup, but there is a photo folder that is very important to me.

Did I learn a lesson this spring? YES!

So, now I turn to you, the true HDDGurus to see if this is a lost case...

No it is not a lost case. If you stop to play with this now and find someone with proper tools he should be able to do this for you for a very small charge. This is not a TVS problem on this board and that is not why it is doing it. This is a very common problem on WD boards. Stop using it, Stop trying to work on it. The more you do the harder it will be to get back the file you want back. You do need proper tools to do this one with though. Sorry to say this.

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Iorana Haraharaini

with the simptoms ur describing - possibly a weak head finaly decided to die.

Disclamer VERY dangerous. VERY VERY VERY data destructive. Failure rate is very high unless u spend some time to practice.

http://hddguru.com/content/en/articles/ ... k-Q-and-A/

If it is really important to u , that folder, sit on the drive for a while , make some money and seek DR help from a pro.

PS Congrats that u did get most of the stuff from it. U are a lucky one m8.

Yeah, actually now I remeber... I think the transfer rates was getting slower, and slower. Hard to say just a hunch that I have.

OK, will see if I can recover some more data from friends and family, might have sent some pictures to them.

Then I guess that it will be a replacement drive from WD. Sad, I really wanted to fix it 100% but I did find a good hdd forum where I sure will lurk in the future.

A "normal" user has 0% chance of success here, especially with this model of drive

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Thanks for the replys so far.
Why is it 0% chance for a normal user on that drive? To me that sounds lika a challenge!

So, it turns out some of the backups were no good so the backuped data is less than I thought, which means this will probably be a proffessional recovery job after all.
In Sweden and Norway we have IBAS, who is well known to be proffessional and expensive. Who did we have on the forum? Some guys from UK and from DE?
Anybody who feels this is a piece of cake?

"Normal" user lacks experience and knowledge needed to successfully work with drive internals. Beyond that standard warning, these drives are custom tuned to the heads that are in them. Chances of finding another one in the wild similar enough to "just work" are very low, even if you assume a successful transplant. And there is nothing on the outside of the drive to indicate compatibility.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.