WD20EARS Not detectable

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I have been using my WD20EARS for quite some time and the other day my clumsy friend dropped the drive inside of its enclosure. The enclosure was damaged and I do not know from how high it was dropped i just know it was dropped. I plugged the drive into another enclosure and it booted just fine. To then check for damage internally I ran the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic and the drive failed the test. Then it disappeared completely, even in BIOS. I am confused to why the drive all of the sudden won’t show up after I ran the utility. I tried plugging it directly into a sata port, and into another computer with no success. The drive will spin up at first but then clicks a couple times then stops and then repeats the process. 

I was looking at the SATA connector on the drive and pin 1 appears to be broken. The pin is no longer one of the taller ones, it is pushed backed. It also appears to have been ripped from the PCB but I cant tell if it is stilled attached. I know that there are three ground pins on the connector but could this pin being broken explain why the drive suddenly quit?

2

ISTM that your drive probably has head and/or media damage. :frowning:

3

It had worked perfectly before the WD utility which has me confused. I tried transferring a file and it worked perfectly before the utility. Is it possible the pin is the problem?

4

AIUI, the ground wires that separate the SATA Tx/Rx signal pairs provide noise immunity. Their absence would not cause the clicking during power-up. I would expect that a missing signal ground would result in communication errors, but these would probably be correctable. You would see a non-zero raw value for the UDMA CRC Error Count attribute in your SMART report.