WD2000 Cavier help

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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I have a failed WD2000 Caviar (EIDE) I need help with.  It held my photos among other things and naturally some more recent ones were not backed up.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is actually a firmware corruption issue.  This particular motherboard has a history of doing weird things to (previous) secondary drives.  They become inaccessible to Windows (XP) which wants to reformat them.  Recovery software can usually retreive things.

This time it’s different as the drive doesn’t come up at all.  BIOS says that the drive is identifying as a Barracuda – a different make. 

I did try getting the identical drive off eBay. with the same numbers on the circuit board.  I verified that it worked okay and then tried swapping in that drive’s board onto my bad one but it didn’t fix things.

Just to confirm, firmware repair is not something I can do myself, right?  I believe there is special hardware tools recovery businesses have to connect to drives and fix this sort of issue.

Any assistance or recommendations for recovery services would be appreciated.  I know recovery never comes cheap but I don’t want someone giving me a song and dance about clean rooms and moving the platter when in reality they just plug in a tool, reload firmware, and it’s done.   I certainly willing to pay for specialized knowledge and tools however.

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for future reference a backup solution would be cheaper than what you have been doing and what you might have to do to get your data back *if you can. Personaly i just burn dvd’s for stuff at least once a year or more and in case of a problem i won’t lose everything if i start over. although i would never burn a dvd with out checking the dvd with special tools though, reported success don’t usually mean anything.

anyway use the search function here for drive board / pcb repair and go to the links people are always posting… sorry i forget what it is but there is one popular site you should go to donordriverepair.com or something like that… that will help get you on the right path for parts OR paid pro help / service.

i wish you the best of luck and i am sorry to hear about your trouble, we all here know what your goin though :frowning: