Wd 750GB caviar black. BIOS can 'partially' see HDD, shows 0gb, 0 sectors

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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I have a WD Caviar Black 750GB,  MDL# WD750AALS - 00E880.

It’s almost 2 years old and has been fine up until last week.  Windows 7 was getting a bit sluggish so I did a reinstall.   I usually partition my drives as follows: 100gb for the OS, and the rest for data.  So this drive has a 100gb primary part.  and 650gb partition.  Anyhow, Windows 7 reinstalled fine and after the 2nd or 3rd reboot, it hung on the windows splash screen.  After that, it would hang during the POST for about 30 seconds and give me the “Primary Hard Disk Error”  Press F1 to continue.  BIOS can see a hard drive but can’t see anything about it except the model: WDC750 etc…  It shows a 0gb size and 0 sectors and so forth.  Other hard drives will auto-detect with no issues, you can tell when it’s trying to detect the bad one because it hangs for 30 sec or so.  I’ve been reading these forums and scouring the internet for answers and ideas.   I tried Test Disk and Gparted and neither can see the drive.  I’ve read that trying a PCI SATA controller might work as I have an ASUS motherboard P5K deluxe and their controllers have had issues?.  Haven’t tried that yet.  Is this a firmware issue?  can I swap PCB’s?  I’m just learning all this from recently reading the myriad of issues and helpful solutions on this community board, which is amazing by the way.  Please throw me any ideas as I have years of photos and music on here that I really need(and should have backed up!)  and I hear professional data recovery is crazy expensive.    Thanks!

Jesse

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Hey there, I had the same issue and what I did was run the Extended Test with the software on WD web site called Data Lifeguard Diagnostics. Give it a shot it could be helpful because if it finds errors in the drive it will try to repair them. 

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I did give that a try and it gave me Error Code 0132.  I’ve sent a drive off to get ‘repaired’ before,  and all I got was a new drive and “hey, your old dirve is non-recoverable,”  And all my data was gone forever, no chace to take it anywhere else.  Note that this was not WD Cust SUpport though.  Can you speak to their recovery abilities and service.  I’m nervous to send it off.  THanks.

Jesse

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I know where you are comming from, I ended up sending my drive to a Data Recovery Company that I found in this list.

http://support.wdc.com/recovery/index.asp?lang=en&selregion=americas

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Thanks for this!  Can you tell me about your experience with them? Who you used?  Price paid?  Data recovered?  Same Symptoms? 

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I was recommended to use Ontrack Data Recovery and they restored over 90% of my files, and stored them on another drive the price varies according to them, price starts at 200 dollars and it depends on the procedure they have to perform.

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