Phil Conners Posted September 3, 2013 Share Posted September 3, 2013 My Western Digital 320GB SATA drive died a quiet death yesterday. No noise, no smell, just went loopy for a while (trashing) and then completely stopped. It's now not even recognized by the BIOS so no amount of software tool would help. The drive itself is no big deal but I have a few files on it I'd like to try to recover. Since there was no noise I think the drive is probably ok, most likely the PCB is dead. I already checked the two diodes that typically are the first to go, unfortunately they're fine, so it's something more serious. My last shot is if anyone might sit with a identical drive where the disk has crashed and the PCB works, and I could get that for a small price. To have a chance of working it would have to have the same PCB BIOS level as this, that is, somewhere on the sticker it should say WD3200AAKS-00V6A0 Yes I know it's a long shot, and yes I have backups of all my important data. This is the gray area, stuff I'd like to recover if possible, but could recollect if necessary. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Suradit69 Posted September 3, 2013 Share Posted September 3, 2013 (edited) My Western Digital 320GB SATA drive died a quiet death yesterday. Must be something in the air. Mine died last week too. Or at least I realized it was no longer listed as a drive last week. Not sure of the model, but it was a WD external hard drive that I thought was backing up stuff for me quietly and efficiently. Quiet it was. I bought a replacement from Seagate. One Terabyte "Back Up Plus" that joins an older Seagate 500 Gigabyte that still seems to be chugging along. I assume between the two of them that most of what I deem important is being saved. The WD drive could now be used as a door stop, if I had any doors that needed stopping. Coincidentally, or maybe not, my uninterrupted power supply UPS also died recently. Maybe something in the electric supply did them both in. PS: Sorry I can't be of help to you, but there was something here http://www.adcworks.com/2008/06/diy-how-to-rescue-data-from-your-western-digital-mybook/ about rescuring a WD "MyBook." Not sure if that's any help. I'm too computer illiterate to know if it's relevant. Edited September 3, 2013 by Suradit69 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeverSure Posted September 3, 2013 Share Posted September 3, 2013 Put your hdd in the freezer. Then while it's still cold, very quickly hook it up and see if it will let you get your files. It's worth a try. It worth several tries. It often works, but please read these instructions: LINK 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turkleton Posted September 3, 2013 Share Posted September 3, 2013 Not a 320, but a 500GB. ~3 years old. After a BSOD and the following reboot, Windows wouldn't start anymore. It stopped always while booting, with a BSOD and a "kernel_data_inpage_error" Googled around and it seemed to be a HDD error. I've burned a Boot-CD with SpinRite This tool has found loads of bad sectors, but could "repair" them, so Windows was able to start. (Spinrite was running for ~8 hours) I immediately cloned the HDD with "Acronis True Image" to a new 1TB Seagate. Time for a (Backup) NAS now, me thinking.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ignis Posted September 4, 2013 Share Posted September 4, 2013 Got me worried.... How long do Hard drives last ? When I rebuild my PC always use the old hard drive, is this not good ? I have 3 x Western Digital 320GB SATA and 2 x Western Digital 640GB SATA..... just looked at the stickers on them the newest has a date of October 2007, is that warranty to ? Not sure now a day, but my reasoning was a smaller HDD was less data if the drive went wrong....... both 640GB are Backup 1x true image the other back up and a system copy., lots of much older IDE hardrives with backup data on. Think of doing a rebuild soon, new Motherboard as well, is it best to fit a new HDD ? Seagate appear to be far cheaper than Western Digital ? well on the big HDD's a 4TB Seagate is 1/2 the price of the Western Digital Maybe because I am getting old, somehow 2, 3 or 4 TB hard drive has a lot on it if it should go wrong all in one go as it were... I was looking at a SSD for the OS and 2x 1 TB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NeverSure Posted September 4, 2013 Share Posted September 4, 2013 (edited) You are doing backups, right? Win 7 and 8 will image your hdd onto another drive and even has a scheduler. Mine images my %system% ( C ) drive every morning at 2:00 AM. Don't forget to make a restore/boot disk when asked. In less than 20 minutes I can have my computer back to where it was at that time that morning any day. I also run Cobian Backup (free) at midnight on a scheduler. I like it because it doesn't encrypt files so I can just read them and replace. It also uses the volume shadow copy service which gives an accurate snapshot when it starts. Edited September 4, 2013 by NeverSure Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cacruden Posted September 4, 2013 Share Posted September 4, 2013 Had around 10 of 20 400GB hard drives from Western Digital fail several years ago within the first year..... I avoid WD like the plague now. HD's fail but that is a a high failure rate. Just because a drive is old, does not mean that it is more likely to fail than a newer one...... many factors to consider..... always make sure to backup important stuff (for those that have not yet). The majority of my drives these days are Seagates - have had better luck with those ones. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sayonarax Posted September 4, 2013 Share Posted September 4, 2013 Had around 10 of 20 400GB hard drives from Western Digital fail several years ago within the first year..... I avoid WD like the plague now. HD's fail but that is a a high failure rate. Just because a drive is old, does not mean that it is more likely to fail than a newer one...... many factors to consider..... always make sure to backup important stuff (for those that have not yet). The majority of my drives these days are Seagates - have had better luck with those ones. Err and what kind of raid did you use to destroy the headers? Sounds like you made one giant array with low end drives.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cacruden Posted September 4, 2013 Share Posted September 4, 2013 No Raid, JBOD. Found out later that that model was notorious for having problems with heat (even with normal fans) & reliability problems - when used constantly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
loeuftok Posted September 5, 2013 Share Posted September 5, 2013 I also got 4 WD fail within 2 years of use. During the same period I have used seagate on other computers without any trouble... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JetsetBkk Posted September 5, 2013 Share Posted September 5, 2013 Put your hdd in the freezer. Then while it's still cold, very quickly hook it up and see if it will let you get your files. It's worth a try. It worth several tries. It often works, but please read these instructions: LINK Better turn the air-con on to max if you're going to try this! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JetsetBkk Posted September 5, 2013 Share Posted September 5, 2013 (edited) Got me worried.... How long do Hard drives last ? About one month less than the warranty. When I rebuild my PC always use the old hard drive, is this not good ? I have 3 x Western Digital 320GB SATA and 2 x Western Digital 640GB SATA..... just looked at the stickers on them the newest has a date of October 2007, is that warranty to ? Not sure now a day, but my reasoning was a smaller HDD was less data if the drive went wrong....... both 640GB are Backup 1x true image the other back up and a system copy., lots of much older IDE hardrives with backup data on. Think of doing a rebuild soon, new Motherboard as well, is it best to fit a new HDD ? Seagate appear to be far cheaper than Western Digital ? well on the big HDD's a 4TB Seagate is 1/2 the price of the Western Digital Maybe because I am getting old, somehow 2, 3 or 4 TB hard drive has a lot on it if it should go wrong all in one go as it were... I was looking at a SSD for the OS and 2x 1 TB The older, smaller disks are much more reliable than the new, big disks IMHO. So there's no problem in using them until they fail. They all appear to be out of warranty - 6 years old - so you deserve some kind of award for keeping them all going for so long! The good thing about the new, big WD disks is that WD know they are crap and will change them for a new one immediately. They used to give a 5 year warranty, but those days are long gone. The best you can get now are 2 years unless you get an expensive "WD Black". It's been a while since I bought one - a year or so - so I'm not up to date with the current info, but I'm getting ready for another failure. Remember: the data that you don't backup is data that you don't care about. I have 5 backup disks - all external 1.5 and 2.0 TB USB disks, plus one 500 GB spare system disk. They are backups for my 5 internal disks. One final word of wisdom, , don't expect your backups to work - TEST them - especially your system image backups. Second final word, , use a utility like Crystal Disk Info to monitor your drives. This utility lets you know when the drive is starting to fail. . Edited September 5, 2013 by JetsetBkk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Conners Posted September 6, 2013 Author Share Posted September 6, 2013 I'm still looking for a WD3200AAKS-00V6A0 PCB, if anyone should have one lying around Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
h90 Posted September 6, 2013 Share Posted September 6, 2013 The 500GB WD fail all the time. I have 15 and every 2 month one fails. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daffy D Posted September 6, 2013 Share Posted September 6, 2013 I'm still looking for a WD3200AAKS-00V6A0 PCB, if anyone should have one lying around Just had a look at my collection of duff WD disks - I got 6 of them The nearest I could find was - WD3200AAJB-00J3A0 - Guess that's of no use to you - Sorry I don't use WD anymore. :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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