WD laptop hdd - dead but beeping

Hello everybody,

My hdd packed up this morning. It’s a 320 GB SATA drive (WD3200BEVT) and obviously I would want to recover the contents. First potential solution was to re-attach it, as the original BIOS error suggested “no drive present”. This didn’t work, so the issue is, unfortunately, with the drive itself.

First question I have, does anyone know the meaning of beeps (5 longish beeps) that the drive emits, when the system tries to, presumably, contact it? I couldn’t find WD beep / error codes anywhere online, and I presume this sequence points to a problem, like, I don’t know, faulty PCB, or something else. It would help me greatly to know what the sequence means (the drive is out of warranty, so presumably WD support wouldn’t even let me contact them about this).

It might be relevant, that the drive can’t be accessed when connected to another computer either, BIOS reports a secondary master boot failure, or something to this effect. I don’t remember, these days, do I need to move any pins on a drive (SATA) to make it a slave?

Any suggestions on how to solve this issue would be greatly appreciated. I did hear about an option of buying a dead (identical) drive and replacing the PBC, butI have also heard that, in general, this trick does NOT work these days. And as the drive is not visible to the other machine, I can’t even try to use the on-track recovery software which I had used a good few years ago. And I mention those two solutions, because sending it to a professional recovery service is very costly, and I would only do this as a last resort.

Regards,

marek

*no* drive “Beeps” in the way you’re thinking. 

What you’re hearing is an accoustical noise generated by the spindle motor or head actuator trying to do something and failing.  

In short, that symptom isn’t enough to tell what’s happened to the drive.

  Could be corrupted firmware, bad spindle motor, bad PCB, bad head or head servo – any number of things.