I figured I needed to get the exact same firmware revision, and finding someone that was selling the right drive took quite a bit more time. Oops.įor my next attempt, I did more research. After the failed drive continued to emit the “click of death”, I reassembled the donor drive and found that it too was now dead and clicking. Not surprisingly, the transplant failed – I tried swapping platters from the dead drive to the working drive, swapping drive heads, swapping circuit boards – basically all of the possible combinations, only not in the most logical order of progression. I tried to be careful, but in retrospect I was really foolhardy with my approach. Anyway, I threw caution to the wind, opened the failed drive, opened the donor, pulled everything apart – while snapping pictures of the process – and then got it all back together again. That wouldn’t put the kibosh on the transplant idea, though, as the drive heads might be compatible. Here’s where things got really dumb on my part.įirst, I should have tried swapping the system boards if that didn’t work on the new drive, I would at least know that the firmware was incompatible. But, the donor drive worked – I confirmed this in both the USB enclosure as well as with a direct IDE connection – so I decided to try doing a transplant. I had a new Western Digital WD2500JB Caviar SE, but this model had different firmware, a different PCB, and a silver case instead of black, and a manufacturing date that was five months later than the dead drive. I was rash and a little too confident, unfortunately, and when the donor drive arrived I realized I hadn’t done my due diligence: I went on eBay and looked up the drive model, found a potential donor drive, and ordered it. Lather, rinse, repeat, but the drive is never recognized by the OS when connected via USB, or by the BIOS when connected directly via IDE.
I confirmed the drive was dead – it spins up, clicks, sounds like it powers off for a split second, then tries again.
He has a bunch of photos that were stored on an external HDD, a 250GB Western Digital IDE drive from 7 years ago. So, it can work, but it’s by no means guarant eed.įast forward to my latest attempts at fixing a crashed hard drive, this time from my dear old dad. After copying the data off to another hard drive, he tossed both the donor drive and the “sort of working” drive in the trash and called himself lucky. In my brother’s case, he got the pictures and data he was after, but he noted that the “fixed” drive was super slow – like transfer speeds of around 2-5MB/s when 20-50MB/s should have been possible. So, you go out and buy a working drive that’s as close to identical to your failed drive as possible, and then swap some of the working pieces into the failed drive and presto: you have your data back. In his case, my recollection is that either the drive heads or the motor (or both) was at fault. The idea is pretty simple to grasp: when a hard disk fails, there are various components that can go bad, including the power delivery system, the circuit board, the motor/bearings, and/or the drive heads. I actually have a brother who successfully recovered the data off of a failed laptop drive using a transplant maybe six or seven years back. But there’s one option that I have heard can work: the hard drive transplant. Some of those tricks might actually work on occasion, but I’m here to tell you than none of them – no, not even the keyboard sacrifice! – have worked for me in my lifetime of geekdom. Put it in the freezer, knock it on the side, drop it, sacrifice a virgin keyboard under the pale LED light…. (I thought about sweeping this one under the rug, but maybe some of you can learn from my experience.)įirst, most tech savvy people have likely heard of the various tricks you can use to try to get data off of a failing hard drive.
#Wd drive utilities mac keeps crashing full
Sadly, things didn’t go so well this time, but let me go through the full sequence of events. Six months later, apparently a few people still want to know what happened, so this is my story. At the time, I also mentioned that I had a couple hard drives that I was going to try repairing in order to recover some pictures and data for a friend. The “fix” seemed almost too good to be true: dismantle the notebook and blast the GPU with a hairdryer for a couple minutes in order to reflow the solder.
#Wd drive utilities mac keeps crashing code
Earlier this year, I posted a short story and video of my attempt at – and success – repairing a Gateway notebook that was suffering a Code 43 GPU error.
0 kommentar(er)
