Hi.
First of all, the WD is mine, the Toshiba is of a friend, both drives decided to fail more or less in the same time
Both drives were used externally, the wd naturally in a 3.5" externally power supplied usb box, the toshiba in a 2,5" self (by usb itself) power supplied usb box.
Mine was standing in vertical and fallen very few times (for fallen i mean that from vertical it went horizontal) and almost when switched off, the toshiba instead, as much as my friend told me, fallen once when was unplugged (and so unpowered).
The matter is that when he gave me the drive, he said that it only became very slow, but unluckily when I got home, the drive fell from my desktop, again when unplugged (and unboxed) and now the heads bumps and it's not detected either by the usb adapter either by connecting it directly to a sata port.
I attach picture of both labels and control boards numbers, and two audio recordings of the hitting noises.

Since I can't edit anymore the post, I'll rewrite everything here.
Hi.
First of all, the WD is mine, the Toshiba is of a friend, both drives decided to fail more or less in the same time
Both drives were used externally, the wd naturally in a 3.5" externally power supplied usb box, the toshiba in a 2,5" self (by usb itself) power supplied usb box.
Mine was standing in vertical and fallen very few times (for fallen i mean that from vertical it went horizontal) and almost when switched off, the toshiba instead, as much as my friend told me, fallen once when was unplugged (and so unpowered).
The matter is that when he gave me the drive, he said that it only became very slow, but unluckily when I got home, the drive fell from my desktop, again when unplugged (and unboxed) and now the heads bumps and it's not detected either by the usb adapter either by connecting it directly to a sata port.
Instead, my WD drive made weird rattling noise when used and working, but as soon as i accessed the files on it, it stopped rattling. So one day I tried to use HDDRegenerator to check for bad sectors, on a different computer connected directly to a sata port, with the hddreg generated USB Pen tool, and after some fixing nothing went bad. But after a few days, while trying to reuse the drive on its usb box, it started behaving like that and not being detected anymore.
I wonder if it's a matter of failed heads on both drive and what can I do to backup all the data, at least from my 1tb drive, that was quite full when failed Would be enough to switch controller boards or should I try even to swtich heads?
I attach picture of both labels and control boards numbers, and two audio recordings of the hitting noises.
I can't attach the audio files, what can I do to attach them? I tried in 3 formats: wma, mp3 and wav, all to no avail.
Thank you for eventual useful answers.

hello,

if your and your friend data are valuable, then stop working on this drives, if you don't have knowledge and tools.
Find some pro near you. You can contact users of this forum BlackST, Michael Chiklis, IRS

Hello, thank you for your reply.
I obviously stopped working on them since there's no way to access them to make a backup.
I don't know how much important is my friend's data, but mine was kind of, in the sense that it's valuable for me, but not so much to spend big amounts of money to recover and backup it. I can guess my friend is in the same way more or less (he told me that he stored personal pictures, and maybe something else but I don't know what).
The matter is that I want to try to recover it with DIY methods and in last resort with some (inexpensive) DR tools.
BTW, some years ago I already came in here with a problem with a Maxtor drive, and in the thread BlackST answered (it's italian like me), but when I tried to contact him through private message, he didn't answer at all

Oh, I was forgetting: is there a way to upload in the forum my audio recording files? Or should I use an external storing/sharing site and link it here?

Hello,

use external site and link it

Ok, so:
http://www.4shared.com/music/xI90_zkyba/toshiba.html
http://www.4shared.com/music/n-r6hZlQba/wd_online.html

E' molto probabile che entrambi gli hdd abbiano le testine danneggiate.
Se vuoi posso fare alcuni controlli sul tuo WD in remoto...

Hai Teamviewer?

_________________
My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI

Si ho teamviewer ma i dischi non vengono nemmeno riconosciuti, né tramite box (adattatore usb) né tramite connessione a pc su porta sata (sata 1 a dire il vero, potrei provare su un pc con sata 2 o anche sata3)...
Eventualmente puoi dirmi cosa fare ?

For english speaking ppl: sorry, I'll translate another time ^^

L'idea è quella di verificare se è possibile accedere alla SA del hdd con Sediv (versione demo) ed eventualmente controllare i moduli del firmware.
In base a ciò potremmo capire dove sia il guasto, se ad esempio non si riesce ad accedere alla SA è probabile che si siano danneggiate le testine (considerando che ha preso qualche botta in passato a quanto ho capito, è più che probabile che le testine siano danneggiate).
Scarica la versione demo ma non avviarlo, potresti peggiorare la situazione se premessi bottoni a caso, lo farò io in remoto.

Sediv demo download:
http://sediv.net/index.php?view=downloads


The idea is to see if we can access to the SA with Sediv (demo version) and possibly check firmware mods.
Basing on this we can figure out where the fault is, i.e. if we are unable to access the SA is likely that heads are damaged (considering you knocked the drive few times in the past if i understood good, then most likely heads are damaged).
Download the demo version but do not start it, you may make the situation worse if pressing buttons at random, i'll do it remotely.

Sediv demo download:
http://sediv.net/index.php?view=downloads

_________________
My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI