I have an WD7500AAKS in an Antec Mx-1 case connected to a machine running XP. I used the drive for 2 months with no issues.
The other day, I connected the drive to another machine running windows 98. Without powering off the drive, I disconnected the esata cable from the external enclosure and connected the usb cable from the enclosure to the machine running XP. The machine running 98 would not detect the drive properly since the mx-1 does not work with win 98. After I realized this, I powered down the drive and connected it back to the XP machine via the esata cable. Now, if you power up the drive, it beeps for about 15 seconds and then it is silent. The drive does not appear in "my computer." I tried in another enclosure but had no luck. The issue happens even if the enclosure is not connected to the machine.

Note that I accidentally hit my head on the shelf that holds the enclosure/drive when the drive was running (before connecting to win 98) machine. I am not sure if that vibration is enough to mechanically damage a drive, or if the drive somehow got messed up when i connected to the win 98 machine.

Basically, I really need the data off the drive. Other than paying a data recovery place to retrieve the data, does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? I am desperate to recover this data, but I don't have the $ for a recovery service.

BTW, unil recently I have never heard of a speaker in a harddrive. I called WD and they told me that this sound is caused by an issue with the master boot record. I also read a thread on storagereview.com about the maxtor drives that "beep".

As a last resort, should I go for the freezer trick or try tapping the drive at this point?

Thanks...

Hi,

The sound you are hearing comes from the motorcoils. Appearantly the motor is blocked. Could be the heads are parked on the platters or the axis is locked.

Anyway, this is a job for a recovery-company. Nothing you can do yourself.

Dobre

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Datarecovery in Belgium, Holland, France and Germany
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I had a local data recovery place look at it and they told me that the issue is that the headstack is loose. They do not have a cleanroom and were able to come to this conclusion via software. So now that the drive would have to go to a cleanroom to be fixed, they said it would be at least $1200. Ontrack said it would be 1200 to 1900 dollars. Is that a fair price?

So I'm assuming freezer would def not help in this case and there is def nothing i can do myself. Is that correct? What about swapping the headstack with one from an identical drive? How risky is this for some one who has never done that before?

Can me hitting the desk from the bottom by accident be enough to loosen the headstack? I heard slight another sound a month ago when the drive was working. I thought it was the fan in the enlosure but i guess it may have been the beginning of what eventually rendered the drive dead.

In WD drives even for professional data recovery companies head replacement is 60% sucessful . So for an amature it would only be 10% .