I am in the same boat as you. I have the same drive fail on me, came from a WD passport. I have seen all of Scott's videos too. I too can't afford to send it off to a pro. Yet, I am willing to sacrifice $40 on a new drive for salvage parts for the old one. So were you able to recover all you needed data? How did you find the matching drive WD3200BEVT-22A23T0 (specifically the bold part). Please post you video! Thanks in advance.

BTW my drive is clicking and it sounds like it spins up, I am hopping it is the pcb.

Anyone can try to recover their own data without specialized tools. But they should clearly understand that -- especially in cases of mechanical problems -- they may lose everything in the process. If they are willing to take that risk, that is their own affair, not mine.

But I do take exception to your claim that the data recovery industry is a "masquerade" of scammers. Granted, there are some bad actors, but my feeling about most of the pros here is that they are people of high integrity.

I think it is safe to say that you have a minimal understanding of how specific hard drives work, and hard drives in general. If you are so confident about your own abilities, I invite you to find five different hard drives with mechanical or firmware issues; give them your best shot, and report the outcome. Honestly and completely.

Scott is a nice fellow and he has compiled a lot of info about ways to approach data recovery problems. But you should also understand that training is a business for Scott. People pay him to attend his courses. Infomercials are a time-tested way to advertise . . .

In many respects, the internet "solutions" really do people a disservice. I have reviewed many that have questionable or erroneous practices -- very few report how much data they actually recover. What is almost never revealed are BEST PRACTICES that are usually only discovered though research and hard work.

I have a challenge for Scott which I will suggest to him. I wish he would put out a survey as part of all of his free internet expositions, and ask that each person who uses the techniques report back on how their individual recovery went. I think it would be both interesting and informative.

We folks who do this for a living see a lot of drives that have seen previous recovery attempts by people who did not use best practices. You CAN do a lot of harm trying to do good. The big danger is not knowing what you DON'T know. And there is a hell of a lot to know about these incredibly complex machines. The devil is in the details.

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

wonder if he managed to get all his data? what happened to his DIY video?

It's really sad and disappointing when you get a drive in for recovery and see that someone did some crazy DIY attempt that caused it to become unrecoverable. Scotts videos really do drives more harm than they help.

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Most people who go the DIY route still do not understand what they are getting themselves into, even if we are giving them advice. Unfortunately.

It's not that they don't understand, it is simply they can't afford to have someone else do it. The worst that will happen is you don't get your data back ever, which is where they are at now.

And hours of wasted time =(.


In most cases like this it is really useless to try unless you have access to proper tools, and training with said tools.


I am not trying to tell people that they can't do DIY. I am just trying to help people avoiding wasting time; as time is precious to me.

Not to hijack this thread, but Superbong hit the nail on the head. Many of us just don't have the money to pay for a professional recovery and therefore we look at it as a possibility (DIY) with the risk that the drive might be useless after we screw it up.

I've got a similar situation in that I have a desktop where it was running XP and recognised both drives. I upgraded to Vista Home Premium and the 2nd HDD (Seagate 320 Gig Barracuda) is now "offline" with no way to get it back online. It shows up in the BIOS correctly, it shows up in Device Manager correctly. It even shows up in the Disk Management window pane but that's where its telling me its offline and my only options are to reformat. So... do I want to give up the data on the drive? Not really, but I don't want to spend a couple of hundred dollars on it either. BTW, I even removed the drive and loaded it into a eSata dock, tried connecting it to a Mac and another XP computer... same results... not accessible.

So in my case, with the price of storage so cheap, opening it up to fiddle around doesn't seem that outrageous.

if the drive IDs for you why would u open it ? What are you planing to do ? Man , just get ur hands on the R-Studio, Get Data Back , EASUS , File Scavenger or their equivalents and run a logical scan on the drive...