Hi guys, I was doing a backup last night from my desktop PC to my WD Elements 1023 (500GB, model WDBABV5000ABK-00) when my 2 year old baby girl stormed the room and pulled the cable, resulting in the WD crashing into the floor!

After putting it back together (the plastic cover and the rubber shocks where all over the place), showing no visible/apparent damage on the outside, I proceeded to plug it back into the USB port of the PC, only to find it was detected as a new "USB Storage" device, with no access to my partitions.

Now, I have been doing some basic diagnostics, and the drive is now being recognized with a capacity of 2TB instead of 500GB, and the Western Digital diagnostic tools skips the tests with the message of "too many sectors with errors" (which is of no surprise to me).

After taking the drive out of the plastic container, I noticed that it was making strange noises (no mechanical hard drive clicking noises, but some strange "electonic" noise!), and the drive per se never spins into motion. My question is: from your experience, am I facing a dead PCB/controller issue here, or a mechanical problem with the HD? I have another WD 500GB external drive, but from an older series. To be honest I thought of exchanging their electronics and see if I could make this work, but I'm not desperate (or brave) enough to do this (yet)!

Suggestions, past experiences with this particular devices, horror stories, all are welcome... thank you!
-E

Sounds like seized/stiction or heads mashed into the ramp.

Very very very unlikely to be PCB IMHO

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I agree with pcimage; unfortunately nothing you can do yourself.

Dobre

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+2 for what pcimage said.

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Thank you guys, it seems mechanical indeed... I just compared some sample hdd failure sounds with my own, and it sure doesn't look good.

Thanks again for your replies!