Need help with dead WD20EARS-00MVWB0

So my daughter was watching some of her movies that I backed up onto the drive (external element case) and her brother ran by and tripped over the usb cable sending the drive crashing to the hardwood. Drive would detect but couldn’t read and I could tell something was up with the heads cause I could hear the arm clicking. Not having the $100’s it would cost to send drive off I opened up the drive and spun the platters and the arm wouldn’t move up so I gently pushed the arm back up over the platters and quickly sealed the drive up. I was able to get about a gig of info off the drive before it stopped reading again. I figured maybe the arm was having trouble getting back over the platters again. But to my dismay, the actual heads on the arms were flopping around.

So my question is, is there anyplace to find just the read / write arm or is it possible to order one from WD (long shot I know). Or would any drive from the WD20EARS series have the same arm as the drive I have (00mvwb0) that I could find on ebay (a parts drive if you will)? I only need to get the info off the drive and after that it’ll get sold for parts :slight_smile: You know the whole dust thing and all.

Thank you,

-Eric

That’s kind of difficult to get, however you can contact fzabkar he’s really good with the drive internal parts.

Looks clear to me the disk assembly itself is trashed. This make the disk unrecoverable.

I only use notebook disks as externals as they can live on USB power and are less likely to be killed

Better is to use a server if you have that much content. An old machine can act as a home server easy.

…wow, why go through all the time and expense of trying to repair a dead HD instead of just re-ripping her movies to a new disk?

Cause it’s not just movies I’m looking at loosing. This was my backup of my backup drive but it failed so I was in the process of preparing a new backup drive when this happened.