I’ve tried putting this 640 gb laptop size drive in two different enclosures. Both times I hear drive try to spin up and then hear a dual monotone buzzing sound, the first buzz being a lower tone than the second.I put the drive in my freezer for 4 hrs but same prob. Was I supposed to try drive right out of freezer? I let in warm back up first.
Hi, don’t really know if the freezer trick works, but the best way for you to know if the HDD is working or not, is to connect it directly to the computer and run a test with DLG. Check the link below.
I’ve since plugged drive directly to my pc with same result. Drive won’t spin up and isn’t recognized by windows. In this case using above program would be useless right?
Yup, if the hard drive is not recognized by the computer Bios or on disk management, then DLG wont either.
It sounds like the drive may be affected by stiction (heads stuck to platters), or it may have a seized spindle bearing. Sometimes “percussive maintenance” may break the adhesion, but there are significant risks …
1 Like
any particular way I should be shaking it or hitting it?
If you are not prepared to pay for professional data recovery, then some people have advised holding the drive horizontally in the palm of your hand, and then rotating it quickly backwards and forwards. My old IBM DeathStar responds nicely to a rap on the edge of the casting with the handle of a screwdriver. Do NOT be tempted to hit the motor. The bearing in my IBM drive became VERY noisy after I did that. 
See this Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction#Hard_disk_drives
This thread may interest you (it has a couple of success stories):
http://forum.hddguru.com/samsung-portable-500gb-dead-t14351.html#p99445
See the warnings on page 5 of the following article.
Disk Drive Science (Steve Legg):
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/7803/5/DiskDriveScience_copy.pdf
Here are photos of what can go wrong:
http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15911#p105001
Here are some sound samples from failed drives:
http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php
http://www.hitachigst.com/hddt/knowtree.nsf/cffe836ed7c12018862565b000530c74/4b1a62a50f405d0d86256756006e340c?OpenDocument
2 Likes
Fzabkar has a really good point.
I will add that bearings usually dont fail on wd specially 2.5", but heads getting stuck to the platters is a really common problem. Rotating it sometimes can work on 3.5" drives due to larger rotating mass, but not on 2.5". 2.5" drive’s platters are too light to move like that. Depends really on how valuable the contents are to you. Ideally the drive would need to be opened in clean room environment and manually rotated till heads get parked any recovery company that does this kind of work should have no issues, and WD platters are rather more forgiving than say Seagate. Hitting slightly might break them free, but it can also cause irreversable damage too.
