Hi,

A few days a go I got a smart warning inside windows of imminent drive failure for one of my data drives. I started backing up but only got a small amount of data before the transfer froze and I could no longer access the drive. The drive shows in disk management but afterwards this will lock up until the drive is removed. I have also tried connecting via USB. The drive spins up and sounds OK, no unusual clicking or grinding.


The content of the drive is not important enough to send away for data recovery... however it would save me a headache if i was able to get the data myself. (a lot of music to re-rip and documents to rewrite).

I have ran MHDD to get some more information and I have posted this below.

If someone could take a look and give some advice on what to try or what the possible issues are it would be much appreciated.

I have listed the commands and results below along with a couple of pictures.



MHDD:

eid:

WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1 LBA: 3,907,029,168
SN:WD-WCAVY2659996 FW:80.00A80


cx:

Read error

Maximum 0.00
ERROR: Seek Test FAILED!
Stopping drive...

rx:

Receiving from port 1x0...
file : log\mhdd_rx.buf
----------------------

----------------------
0 bytes.
0 sectors.
Done.


scan:

WDC WD20EARS-00S8B1 LBA: 3,907,029,168
SN:WD-WCAVY2659996 FW:80.00A80 Size = 1907729MB
Init drive: [RECAL]
: Drive not responding or operation canceled.

Thanks,

Gordon.

Drive is toast. Get out what you can with free stuff (google will be your friend) and replace - if possible.

If you don't want an headache a pro can do it for you with professional equipment in few hours and AT THIS POINT it's not a big deal and big £££.

If you keep tinkering the drive CAN die during the copy or by itself then the cost will no longer be the same.

Keep in mind that a drive in this state is prone to hang during copy and become unresponsive, and there's nothing you can do (no free stuff can help you) except cycle power and stress the drive more and more, until it says "had enough !".

It seems it cannot read or write to the drive using the tests. For myself, I got an I/O error and thought it was a bad HD when it was just a locked drive.

Being you had r/w ability and did access the drive, then it failed, I kina rule out a firmware lock on the thing. And since you did an EID and no lock was present, thats not the issue.

I am leaning towards a HD board failure. I presume your PC BIOS can detect the drive? One way I determined my HD was ok was I was able to low level format the thing, through my BIOS with no errors or sectors marked as bad or unreadable.

I don't know if you need any data, but I'm thinking if you cant even do that, its a failed/failing HD board.

I found something like that at this forum as well:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop-Por ... d-p/220704

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I might consider sending it off if the price isn't too high. I have the drive unplugged for now anyway as I'm waiting on a replacement to try and copy the data to.

Can I ask out of curiosity, what is likely to be the issue with the drive itself ?

Does it look like faulty heads, firmware, controller ?

Thanks again.

Gordon.

To me it is simply a drive that has been working 24/7 , intensively and run hot . These drives are cheap and not intended for that use and have a known - for us - failure mechanism. The problem is internal.

Suggest you contact forum member "buster80" he is in Glasgow and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised how reasonably priced he can do this for.

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