damaged drive still spinning, fixable?

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bench261

Gawd
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Jan 11, 2005
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my 2tb caviar black just died 2 days ago. The drive will spin but OS won't boot with the drive still connected. I'm assuming the motor is fine as it can spin freely AND continuously. The bios can sense the drive but OS can not under disk management. I tried in another computer, same thing.

I have a spare identical drive, does this even seem fixable if i swap logic boards? anyone know? Thx in advance
 
hrmm... thats what I was thinking right away, the drives onboard controller is toast. If you're confident you can swap boards without ruining the donor in the process I'd say give it a try.

Maybe someone with more expertise in this field can chip in.
 
thx for the response....well i swapped the logic board...no go :( I guess i'm gunna try freezing even though the disk spins.
 
All I can suggest is giving spinrite 6 a go. Unfortunately a bit expensive, but if the bios can still see the drive and it spins up it's the best chance at data recovery short of sending it and half your life savings off to a data recovery center.
 
Yoda4561 said:
All I can suggest is giving spinrite 6 a go. Unfortunately a bit expensive, but if the bios can still see the drive and it spins up it's the best chance at data recovery short of sending it and half your life savings off to a data recovery center.
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DR is a lot cheaper now. Granted it's not free but a few places charge $400 for it now. The price could go up based on difficulty or whatever though.
 
I wouldn't make that assumption - the problem could be a stuck or malfunctioning head. Personally, I would open the drive up, plug it in and see if there's anything visually apparent.
 
Thanks for the responses guys, i tried everything. Yeah i think it's a malfunctioning head, i opened it up and i think the head wouldn't budge, so i budged it and it moved to the platters...and from there it got stuck. When i fired it up, it made weird sounds...probably because the head wouldn't move.

I also read somewhere that the logic board must be very specific down to the firmware and revision, so maybe that is what is busted and why the head won' move. Prices for them are 50 and i bought the 2tb for 70, might as well buy a large slow RELIABLE drive since the failure rate for the 2tb caviar are bad.
 
I lost 1TB of data once. family photos and music and all sorts of stuff. its one of those things where its not worth $1000 or even $500 to get it back but it really sucks.
 
I would download the bootable WD tools. That program can scan the drive and often fix problems with it. I'd give a shot considering it's free.
 
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