WD Data Recovery Information

When it comes to data recovery one of the most common problems of Western Digital hard drives that suffer data loss is burnt cuircuit board(PCB). WD drives are very vulnerable to power surges and bad power supply unit combined with power streak is usually enough to burn spindle driver chip on the PCB and make the data inaccessible. Should this occur the computer would reboot itself, you would normally notice acrid smoke coming from your PC and upon power on the drive would not spin up at all.

If this is the case you can try PCB swap from another WD drive of the same model but the chances this will work are really slim. The fact is that most modern drives have special parameters in the ROM chip on the logic board called adaptives which are unique for this particular drive and these parameters should correspond to the drive PCB was manufactured with. In our lab we are able to read ROM contents even from burnt logic boards and write it to the compatible donor board. After this procedure donor PCB becomes fully compatible with the damaged drive and quite often data could be recovered. Unfortunately in about 40% cases it is still not enough to get your files back as power surge can strike not only the PCB but also preamplifier chip located on the head stack inside the HDD. In this case the only way to recover the data would be opening the drive in the clean room and swapping the head stack.

Western Digital hard drives are also well-known for their firmware problems.
Firmware of the drive is not located on the PCB as most people may think. Main part of firmware is stored on the platters in so-called System Area. System Area occupies the negative cylinders of the platters and contains a number of firmware modules. These modules are like system files in Operating System - some of them are crytical, others are not. If one of the modules becomes corrupted the whole hard drive micro-operating system can't boot up, the drive fails to initialize correctly and stops working making the data inaccessible. If this situation occurs the drive may either identify with its factory alias(for example WDC ROM MODEL-MAMMOTH-), with wrong S/N (for example WDC-ROM SN# XYZ---) or show zero capacity. If you attempt to boot up from such drive or read any data from it you would get "Primary Master Hard Disk Fail" or "No operating system found" error or something else.

At the moment there is no way to fix this type of problem at home. It is quite a complicated job and requires special expensive equipment and deep knowledge of hard drive design and data recovery techniques. Luckily, it doesn't usually require opening the HDD in clean room and using donor drives, so chances of successful data recovery are quite good.

Another quite common symptom WD drives have is clicking/knocking sound. The drive spins up and and the head starts clicking right away with a constant or intermittent sound(click to listen). The drive may spin up, spin down, spin up again(click to listen). Most often this a sign of damaged heads and it means this drive needs to be opened in the cleanroom in order to exchange headstack. Don't try to open the drive by yourself - most likely you will damage the platters making your data unrecoverable.

There is one more problem that is typical for all Western Digital drives: bad sectors. After some period of time magnetic media the platters are covered with starts to degrade and magnetic domains can't turn in the desired direction by writing element of the head. This is how bad sectors appear.
When the drive starts reading data from such unreadable bad sector it could start freezing, scratching and sometimes even clicking. This leads to further damage to the surface, heads and causes more data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms while reading important files stop the drive immediately and send it to our data recovery lab. Any further attempts would just add up to the problems. In our lab we use special imaging hardware tools that are capable of reading raw sector data ignoring checksum check. That's usually the only way to recover as much data as possible from such sectors.

Below is the list of models manufactured by WD. Click on yours to see if there are any special remarks about it. If you can't find your model in the list there is still a great chance we can handle it. Just fill out evaluation form or contact us.