I’ve got a 1TB WD10EZEX that stopped working on me a couple weeks ago. Neither Device Manager nor Disk Management can see the drive, and it isn’t listed in the BIOS. I’ve swapped SATA cables/ports and power cables/ports. I’ve gone into the Command Prompt to see if diskpart can see it, and even gone so far as to see if Debian Linux can see it.
The only things I can think of that may have caused this are that I got a new power supply and put it in, and there was a power surge/outage. Both occurred a week and a half or so before I noticed the drive wasn’t working. The reason i didn’t notice it wasn’t working before this is because I only use it for storage of files that don’t need to operate quickly. Images, downloads, various documents. Anyway, I think the power outage may be the more likely cause since, while I do have everything plugged into a surge protector, my house is quite old and thus not grounded.
Is there any way to save the drive at this point, or is it a loss?
Edit: I did forget to mention that I can tell for sure that the drive isn’t spinning up on startup.
Not very likely YOU would be able to fix it unless you have some electronic expertise and a “clean” room. There are places you can send it to for recovery of data. It’s NOT inexpensive!
A trick (with some luck) I have used to get a HDD spinning is to connect it to the PC externally. Lay the drive flat on the table. Pick it up in one hand by the sides. Then move your wrist back a forth a few times and see if it spins up. This movement causes the platters inside the drive to move which in turn moves the motor and may cause it to spin up if it’s not a problem on the circuit board… Be ready to copy your data from it because it might not spin very long or if the power gets cut off it’ll stop.
Good luck! Remember: a backup of your precious data is your best friend!!
Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of. I’ve even read up about HDD issues and it seems most likely the PCB got messed up in that power surge (I have no idea how everything else is fine). The system doesn’t see that anything is plugged in and the drive doesn’t spin up…
I don’t suppose simply buying the exact same PCB and swapping it would work, assuming that’s all the issue is?
Worth a shot if the data means a lot to you. Who knows, if there’s a part number on the PCB you might be able to find one cheap on ebay. I did that with a TV I have that got zapped by lightening. Bought a main board for 25.00 installed it and my TV was working again!
You might find a used drive cheap or a used drive for parts on ebay or there might even be someone selling used boards from old drives…If you search you might find it by the drive’s model number or best might be part number on the PCB.
EDIT Just found this it might come in handy…It appears you probably need the BIOS chip off the old PCB and a means to solder it to the new one.
Funny that you found that tutorial there. This is where I had read up about swapping the PCB and how it may not be as simple as just swapping the whole board. It’s also where I bought a 2060-771829-005 PCB to try swapping it.
Most of the data on the drive isn’t super important. I had Windows’ User files relocated to that drive, so videos, documents, music, and the downloads folder are there. Most of it isn’t very important, but pictures of my kids off my wife’s old phone (which we no longer have, of course) are on it. I don’t think I want to spend a ridiculous amount of money sending the drive to a lab to recover the data, but I will at least try to do what I can on my own.
I hope you have good luck with it what ever you end up doing. A new drive might be about 40.00USD so…but if it’s a boot drive for Windows I would get a 1TB SSD. I’ve replaced HDDs in all my HTPCs and desktops and laptops with them because they boot up sooooo much faster! Just something to think about.
Oh yeah, when I got this computer, I actually had an SSD specifically for Windows to be installed on and then this hard drive that is now broken for the everything else drive. A while ago, I’d picked up a 500GB SSD and turned that into the drive I installed games and programs on and made the now-defunct drive the one that just held files that don’t have to perform fast.
Since this occured, I ordered a Samsung 970 EVO 1TB model to use in my m.2 slot. I’ve got an older motherboard, so I’m only going to get about half it’s possible speed out of it…but that speed is still about 2.25x the speed of the SSD I have stuff running on now
The fun part is going to be uninstalling games/programs from their current drive and putting them on the faster one
New PCB showed up. I swapped it with the one on the nonfunctional drive, plugged everything back in, and started up the computer. The drive spins up now…except Disk Management won’t initialize it (nevermind that initializing it will also have me format it and thus lose the data anyway). I’m thinking I’ll have to swap the BIOS chip with the one from the old PCB.
