I have a 2TB My Passport portable drive, makes a clicking sound when powered up then it stops spinning, light flashes.
I can see it in Device manager, I have updated drivers, It is seen by WD Utilities program but fails the status test.
Is the drive salvageable or not ??
Just to clarify, the HD was in use at the time and was knocked off the desk onto a tile floor. I have removed the drive from it’s case and had a look at the internals and the heads were in the parking bay so they were not stuck on the platens.The model number of the drive is WD20NMVW. There is data which i wish to recover so formatting is not an option. I have tried several Data recovery programs but they cannot access or give me an indication of how much data is on the drive. Hope this helps with your response. Cheers.
So, to summarize your issue, You dropped the drive, then proceeded to remove the drive from the enclosure, then you disassembled the drive yourself to look at the internals without the use of a clean room? Honestly, your chances are slim to none for recovering the data yourself. If you hadn’t taken the drive apart, you may have had a chance with a data recovery company using the proper tools and operating environment. Not to sound cruel, but you pretty much have a paperweight now.
Timothy, exactly! Some people should never be allowed access to a screwdriver!
Seems to me that if something delicate hits the floor, it is likely “toast”, and asking about it in a forum isn’t going to reverse that!
mike, everyone is entitled to an opinion but you don’t have to be mean. Andrew made an honest mistake and has probably learned from it. If you can’t provide something constructive to a forum post, best to not say anything at all.
Firstly its a friends hard drive, secondly I had a clean environment when the drive was disassembled. Data recovery cost is out of reach financially for my friend. So I thought someone more knowledgeable than myself would be able to help…looks like i’m sadly mistaken. 
. I’ll take my problem elsewhere.
Good point Timothy, although it was not meant to be mean. Look at it this way:
For the sake of others reading this thread who could be inclined to do something similar, it does help to point out to them that if you don’t know what you are doing, don’t mess with something.
I was in electronic repair for quite some time, and unfortunately met too many people who brought stuff in for repair that they tried to fix, but if they had just brought it in before they messed with it, it might have been easily salvageable, but wasn’t anymore. Darn that WD-40 people seem to want to spray on and into anything! Apologies to Andrew for using his experience to make this point clear to others.
BTW, I really believe a drive that hit the floor was likely toasted for good, but since I am not a drive repair guy, I can’t be certain of this. For sure, Andrew would have fainted when a data recovery firm told him the estimated price of possible repair and recovery of data.
Also, for Andrew and anyone else reading this, Andrew is now in deep-doo not because he tried to fix his broken drive. He is in the deep stuff, because he apparently did not have his valuable data backed up to another drive. Otherwise, he could have just cussed a bit over the broken drive, and then carefully use his backup until he bought another drive to be his new back up drive. THIS is the actual lesson to be learned from this experience.
