So as the Title says, my hard drive disappeared all the sudden sunday night. I have a samsung 1tb HD (main) and a WD 320gb (backup) both are sata drives and the samsung works fine but the WD is the issue.

when booting up the post and bios see's the WD drive. if I change sata slots I see windows re-installing the WD drive but when I check my computer it doesnt see it. I tried the diagnostics but it tells me I have to 'initialize' my HD and when I try it says I cant. so whats going on? is it my partition? or did the whole thing just go kaput?

I have to recover data off the drive. alot of it is very old and damn near impossible to find anymore aside from the gigs of MP3's, videos and family photos.

I had a friend check it out and said based on an error message he researched on WD's website that the drive is toast and to chuck it, so I figured it would hurt to try the PCB replacement trick. now with that in mind I know alot of numbers need to be the same, but aside from the Model number and firmware does the DCM have to be exactly the same? if I look on the controller board can I get away with just replacing a similar board number/revision number?

the drive spins up, just gives me an IO error when trying to talk to it.

see this thread I made on another site if you need more info. pics too:
http://www.techsupportforum.com/hardwar ... eared.html

If your drive spins up, its 98% not a PCB problem. Even if you fall in to other 2%, simple PCB swap won't work, unfortunately, because PCB contains unique adaptive info to a drive.

Your problem could be very inexpensive to solve, if you find right people. We can help you with it.

If you will persist on DIY method, I would suggest to make an image of that drive first.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

PCB sounds like is fine.

It is clear your data holds value, and also you nor your friend are able to recover the files.

If you want to continue with DIY it is posible you may get some success, but is also possible that you make the problem worse.

Does your WD make clicking sounds? Is it identified by correct model in 'diagnostics;? What is the error code your friend researched?

There are many reasons you get this symptom, and many reasons could easily be related to physical failures.

If you do decide to proceed with DIY you should first get a proper diagnostic with the correct tools (No, not some free WD tool from WD site!) and then you should also accept that you will poentially worsen the situation.

Alterntaively,you should at least get an idea of professional costs by way of some enquiries. If data is valuable then professional assistance is highly recommended

Ok , u can not see it in my computer , how about the device manager ?

If DIY is ur ONLY option and u accept that u might lose data for good - then get a new drive of same or higher capacity. Then bit by bit copy ur WD drive to that new good drive ( programs like HDclone , CopyR ) Then using programs like R-Studio run a scan on the clone that u made and look for ur data there.

harddrivespecialist -- when running data recovery programs the drive gives me bad sector reports. my friend booted up my system with [gparted] and when looking at the drive it saw nothing there. most data recovery systems tell me the partition is gone, yet when I try to recover the partition or see about pulling the raw data from the drive it gives me read errors. A long time ago I had accidentally deleted a partition and recovered files from a drive with no partition so ive figured its obviously something more than just a partition issue.
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hddguy -- before the drive took a nose dive it was making some sounds like a floppy drive would make but when I rebooted my system it cleared the trouble and I was able to access the drive no issues (wish I wouldve backed it up then), what type of diagnostic program do you suggest?

here is the error code info from western digitals site:

[0001 - 0008, 0015] || SMART Error || Self Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) Error returned during SMART Status/Self Test Command. The drive is defective. || Replace Drive
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Alexii -- yes it see's it in device manager but just as some random drive. I forgot about hdclone or copyR


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I will attach a pic of the front and back of the HD, I noticed last night that on alot of the PCB contacts there is heat discoloration making me lean towards thinking the board fried.

thank you all for your quick responses so far. out of all the forum sites ive joined to post my issue this is the best one so far. very informative and quick responses.

You have a scratch on a platter or one of the heads dead or both.
Sorry, but you will need a pro help.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

how do you know this? im not questioning your knowledge level cause its obvious you know more than I do. Im just curious what out of the info pointed to your conclusion.


I saw somewhere that the platters can be transplanted from 1 drive to another, im sure a dust free environment is needed for that though.

so any idea what the general cost is of having a 'pro' pull the data off the drive for me?

This info.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

so it couldnt be a board issue huh? bummer ... was hopin it was something easy like the board just being fried out. well I guess I will just have to research prices to recover data off the drive.


thank you for your help!

no problem

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www.datarecoveryne.com

The usual reason for a SMART failure is an excessive number of bad sectors, usually around 2000 or more. A more comprehensive SMART diagnostic should confirm this. Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

See this article for SMART info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.