Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

Whatever it is it sounds pretty well fucked to me

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

You may want to find Franc Zabkar in WD's forums or ask at HDDguru.com. If that's a JB series drive, apparently there have been issues with it.

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

Pretty sure that's the spindle motor trying to start. Stick the drive in the freezer for a while and try again...

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

Seems head problems..
If you data is valuable, don't mess with it and don't freeze it.
Ask for a pro.

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

The heads might be stuck to the platters. I managed to unstick the head in a laptop drive and get my data off of it, but your drive probably has more than one platter. That will make the process more difficult.

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

My guess as well. Although the "wheee" sound at the end of the vid seems to indicate something else.

Do you feel any continuous vibration on the drive? If so, the motor is running and it's the heads making that noise.

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

I didn't own that drive, so I don't care about the files.

How long should I put it on freezer?

And how long I should wait after I take it out before I test it?

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

At least a few hours so it cools down properly. And you should test it as soon as you take it out, otherwise the magic will be gone. Put the drive in a ziploc bag when you take it out, close the bag around the cables (easier with SATA ), to prevent condensation (to some degree at least).

I'd advise you to put the drive in the bag before you put it in the freezer - otherwise the drive's metallic surface will stick HARD and it'll be damn near impossible to take it out afterwards.

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

I don't advise people to resort to this method unless everything else didn't work. I suspect something on the PCB board is messed up, like a diode or something like that.
It would be safer to just search for another broken drive on eBay and switch the pcb boards first... or at least use a multimeter to test the voltage and amperage going to the motor first (see if it dies when motor reaches a certain speed or not)

Don't put it in the freezer.

Get a couple of plastic jiffy bags (the ones that can be sealed) and a few of those baggies with silica (that absorb humidity).
Seal the drive in a bag with a bunch of those silica baggies then seal the bag in a second jiffy bag. (you should use two because air and humidity goes through the plastic)

Put the drive in the fridge or freezer only if you can get the freezer to cool only up to -5-0C - freezers are usually -20-30c or something and that can damage surface mounted components on the pcb.

Once the drive is for a while at -5-0C, take it out of the fridge, pop open the bags connect the cables then try as best as you can to close the bags again but use a needle or something like that to punch a few holes in the bags.

The reason for this is you don't want a big opening because as drive warms up it water in the air will condensate on it and you may get shorts on the board but at the same time the drive needs some air (the drives and the disk head floats on air cushion and it needs air pressure from outside to work right)

If it works start copying and hope it lasts - you won't get a second chance to make it work.

With more recent drives, you may not be able to make them work with this method, simply because in the first seconds of operation, due to the high rpm speed and friction with the air inside,the platters warm up and expand so the drive needs to recalibrate the disk heads on the tracks.
With such low temperature, the drive's firmware may not even be able to calibrate the heads.

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

Have you ever done that? Because i know both online or in real life, people who have been searching for a compatible PCB for their drive for more than an year, AFAIK, board swaps only work if the drives are from the same batch, unless you own some specialized (and expensive) equipment which allows you to override the head calibration data.

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

I was lucky enough to not have hard drives failing on me yet so no. Yes, I would assume they have to be the same series or something like that,m if the firmware can't be swapped.

I think the recovery companies usually just open them up and mount the platters in other drives. They may even have some quality optics to read the platter surface using lasers or some stuff like that.

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

Not always. They do things like head swaps though. They have a combination of hardware/software tools that understand how data is written on a drive with more than one platter, so if only one head is bad, they force read the drive with the good heads, and only then swap out the bad head and read the remaining side. Then the software reconstructs the data.

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

It's magnetic media... can't read it with lasers.

Re: WD 120GB drive making sounds

I just tried the freezer trick but it didn't work....