WD Caliver Black 1TB not working; Trying to recover data

My PC was having very slow boot ups lately. It seems to take around 5 to 10 minutes for the **bleep** thing to boot up, with lots of blank screens in between. When I managed to get to the welcome screen to log in, it took another 5 to 10 minutes to get to the desktop, plus using programs or just browsing anything on the PC took a few minutes to load.
That was when the problems started, but then why I tried booting the PC up again, it simply wouldn’t load after the BIOS screen. I tried doing a startup repair before then, but it didn’t fix the problem at all. I did some googling and sources claim it could be the power supply or the HDD. I decided to open up my PC and place my hand on top of the HDD to check if it was working, and internals of the HDD didn’t seem to be spinning at all, leading me to believe that the HDD is damaged

I don’t want to just RMA the HDD just yet, because there’s a bunch of files on it that I want to recover. I decided to load Ubuntu Distro from a CD drive to see if the files were damaged. None of my files seem to be destroyed, but since the internals aren’t working properly, I wasn’t be able to grab them and put them on a new drive.
Is there anyway I can fix this thing or at least make it possible to recover my files? I don’t want to end up pay $200-1000 bucks to some Data Recovery center just to get a couple of documents and music files.

You can try using Recuva or PhotoRec as long as the drive is seen by the computer you will be able to recover some information.

I just purchased a new HDD. Installed a new copy of Windows 7 Pro on it and everything.
With that, I tried transferring data from my messed up HDD to my new one.

It wasn’t easy, though. Whenever I tried to boot up Windows 7 on my new HDD, it would try to load the messed up HDD as well, causing the Windows 7 startup screen to hang.
What I had to do to access the drive was work with the PC case open. I turned on the PC with the messed up HDD unplugged. Once I was in windows (which is installed on a new HDD), I plugged the messed up HDD back in and used “Add/Remove Hardware” to enable it. It took several minutes of stalling, but the drive became available again.

I was able to transfer a few files off the drive for awhile, but there was lots of stalls/hangs in between, and the transfer rate kept dropping every several minutes. I was trying to transfer my 1GB documents folder and the time it would take to finish changed from 3 hours to 6 hours, then to 14 hours, then to 1 day, and then it went into question marks…

Besides trying to transfer from another PC, is there any other way I can make this work faster?

I think you just have to tough guy through it.  My WD Caviar Black 1TB WD1001FALS is doing something similar (HD Tune shows warnings on reallocated sector counts (05), reallocated event count (C4), current pending sector (C5) and the transfer rate has a rather unhealthy, spiky performance to it with that same program (min of 0 MB/sec, max of 128 MB/sec, and avg of 19 MB/sec)).   The LifeGuard program took 20 hours to do the extended test (after showing estimates of 170-190 hrs) but it says it passed.  I was able to clone the drive to a new SSD overnight, slowly, but it worked.  Just keep at it.

Now, about the WD LifeGuard program taking 20 hours to complete, jumping between 0 and 128 mb/sec and telling me everything is ok…  grrr.

Yikes… that **bleep**.

But if I must… I’ll try to get by… somehow.

What program did you use to clone the drive onto your new SDD?

In my case it was a limited version of Acronis True Image Home that came with the new drive.  It was a simple install the program, configure with the changes you wanted, and let it run overnight…  then switch cables and reboot.

I copied all the important files to a removable drive using standard Win 7 explorer interface before I deleted all those files on the main drive and used the clone program.  It was going slow enough and I didn’t need to clone stuff I’d already rescued, I just didn’t want to reinstall everything on a computer that was setup only ~4months earlier.

For what it’s worth, after the extended test I used the options to write zeros and do a full (not quick) format on the problem drive with the reallocated sectors and pending sectors.  After that I am left with a 05 - reallocated sector count of 1 and c4 - reallocated event count of 1, and the drive seems to be functioning normally again according to that HD Tune Pro program.

Maybe there was some surface errors that an initial quick format didn’t catch that was causing my problems.  Or maybe it will break soon.