I have a Western Digital IDE WD5000AAKB that suddenly stopped working (it was installed in an external USB Mybook) . The drive still spins and it shows up in disk management, but I cannot initialize it (I get a cyclic redundancy error). Vista also attempts to install drivers, but it shows up in the device manager as a "USB device". If I leave the drive off for a while and turn it on the system will sometimes recognize it and assign it it's drive letter. I can even access the files and folders on it for a short time. It seems after it begins to heat up that it no longer operates. Does anyone have any idea what the problem might be? I was thinking it might be a controller board problem due to the fact that the drive still spins and it occassionally is recognized. If so, can anyone tell me where I might get a controller board for this drive. Thanks in advance.

If you need the data, I'd get the drive out of the box, into a PC, and get the data off.

It isn't gonna get better, you know.

And if the data isn't important, it'll either be a good warranty swap, or look good at the bottom of a trash can. A replacement board will likely cost the price of a drive, and won't be terribly reliable.

However, if it's not under warranty, you can try taking it out of the external enclosure, and see if it works fine in a computer. It could just be the USB-SATA converter is bad.

I'm in the middle of a system build, so I think I'll try putting the drive straight into the PC to see if I can at least get the data from it. Thanks for the suggestion.

Try pulling the PCB off of the drive and cleaning the contacts with a pencil eraser.

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com