I've got a Western Digital Caviar 21000 1.0GB EIDE drive, manufactured in November 1995 and last powered on in June 2000. Since then, it has been sitting in an antistatic bag on a shelf and has never been touched. The drive was working perfectly when it was retired, and it still spins up and sounds reasonably normal when I power it on now, so I have hope that I'll be able to recover at least some scraps of the data on it without having to resort to pricey professional help. I'm interfacing it to a Windows 8 laptop through a USB adapter. I know an actual direct IDE connection would be ideal, but this adapter has always worked flawlessly for a wide range of other drives, and even with this drive the adapter does seem to be doing its job; my computer has no trouble at all detecting the drive and correctly reports its size as 1.0GB. The serial number is also readable, and is correct, so it appears that the electrical fundamentals of the drive are likely to be sound. I'm not enough of an expert to know what I'm hearing, but the noises it's making sound very normal, though a bit noisy. Unfortunately, every read attempt made on any sector fails instantly and completely. I've gone all around the drive from LBA 0 to the very end, to no avail; nothing but I/O errors on every read attempt. I've used various imaging programs to initiate these read operations, including DMDE and HDDGuru's own "HDD Raw Copy", and there is always the same instant failure of every read attempt regardless of the program used. I doubt the jumper setting is an issue here, but I've tried it on Master and jumperless, FWIW.

I'd love it if someone could just give me some clarity on what my next step might be. I do need to recover at least a few bits and pieces from this drive if possible, and I'm sure that 13.5 years of magnetic decay isn't enough to completely wipe out every sector, so there must be something else going on. How can I begin to diagnose this? I would be extremely grateful for any insight anyone could provide. If there's any info I've left out, I'll do my best to provide it. I can also mic the drive if anyone wants to listen to it; maybe you'll hear something that I wouldn't.

A huge thank you for any and all efforts to help!

I have some of this old WD drives too and none of them work with an USB adapter.
Other 1GB drives from Seagate, IBM, Conner or Quantum work fine.
But old WD drives need to be connected to mainboard IDE.

Possibly system area problem

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

This is a typical issue of translator problem or FW problem or maybe locked by ATA password

If the hard drive is that old, you may need to connect it to an old system to read the data of, using windows 7 would probably never work, Microsoft probably never intended that system to read such an old drive. You will probably need a old windows 95 machine and read of your data and transfer it by cd or something. USB might be out of the question unless you can windows 98 or windows ME to read the drive.

I don't think I drive like that would work with a USB adapter, when it was made, USB did not exist I should imagine.

Shane

Hi,
Just go buy a crappy old computer, something like a Pentium II and connect it natively. It would be the cheapest option, with proper valid support for the disk. If you want the data, don't mess around with unknowns.
I know, I try to take fastest route a lot, and endup spending more time and money than if I just did it properly to begin with.
HTH

Wow! It's wonderful to know that there actually is a good chance the drive will work if I try it with an older machine. I hadn't wanted to commit the time and effort to do that because I was starting to think the drive must be busted. With the encouragement in this thread, I'll go ahead and resurrect the PC this drive was originally in, and see what I can do. Thanks, everyone--I'll post again when I've got a verdict

Thank you so much for your kind offer Spildit, but it may not be necessary Thanks to the encouragement of everyone here I spent the 3 hours necessary to resurrect my old PC and sure enough, the drive is fine! It simply required a controller of the appropriate era. Now I'm faced with the daunting task of figuring out how I can image the contents of this drive. I guess the way to go is to pick up a cheap drive in the 1.2 - 2.0 GB range, install it on my old PC along with the 1.0, and image the 1.0 to the slightly larger one. The 1.2 GB drive would need to be readable by my USB adapter, though. Therefore, if anyone has any input on what brands/models of drives in the 1.2 - 2.0 GB range would be the most likely to work with a USB adapter on a modern Win8 PC, that would be a big help

Stick a network card on your old pc and connect it through a network onto a server or your newer computer. Then just copy everything through it.

Thanks for the brainstorming. The network approach is a great idea! I don't know whether it will ultimately be easier to go that way or simply use a 1.something GB drive that my USB adapter can read, but it's good to have options. The drive looks to be flawless or nearly so, with all data intact. I got lucky on this one--if it weren't for this thread, I'd probably have given up by now. This forum is a truly valuable resource.

That USB bridge might just talk LBA48 to the drive and the drive might just undestand LBA addresses. Could be? So immediate ABR errors.

I don't think so, deftrue--other drives of similar vintage work just fine. I think arztt may have been onto something in pointing out that old Western Digital drives simply don't work with USB adapters, though other manufacturers' drives of the same sizes and dates work fine. Perhaps those WD drives depend on obscure or undocumented features of old IDE controllers?

You can download clonezilla bootable CD, put in any size drive larger than the original and just take an image of the hard drive, storing it on the second one. Also, if the drive is, say 20 GB, why not just create a floder on it, call it OLD_1GB and copy the whole thing there. Then if you need access to anything, you dont have to worry about mucking about with images. There are even options to mount a disk image in windows. You could da a physical 2 virtual disk image and open it in VMWare or something. Possibly even Virtual CloneDrive.