Western Digital Caviar Green HD Issue

[dennischu22]

Hey guys,

I've recently run into some trouble with an external hard drive that I bought about 5 months ago. The hard drive was a Western Digital Elements 1.5TB (WDBAAU0015HBK) and worked fine up until last week. When I booted up the system, my computer didn't show it in My Computer all of a sudden. I went into Disk Management and saw that it was now a RAW drive for some reason. I tried plugging the drive into the computer, but with no luck. Still wasn't recognized.

Today, I dismantled the drive and took out the original hard drive in the enclosure, a Western Digital Caviar Green WD15EADS 1.5TB and installed it into my computer. I looked at BIOS, the drive is completely recognized and the device driver was installed upon first boot up. I restarted the computer when prompted to, but upon the second boot-up, the computer hangs at the "Starting Windows" screen. I isolated that it's a problem with that WD Caviar Green drive, as when I unplugged the SATA cable to it, the computer boots up perfectly.

My computer is a custom-built rig and by all accounts should be compatible with the Caviar Green drive. Here are the specs:

Asus P7P55D
Intel Core i5-750
4GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600
Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB (Primary HD)
Corsair 750W PSU

I've looked online for a solution, but there doesn't seem to be one and I wanted to see if any of you had some suggestions. I'm running out of options and I'm hoping that this drive is recoverable, as I have almost 500GB of data on it. Thanks in advance for any help guys!

 

[FreeDataRecovery]

Connect it via USB again and try to run diagnostics on the drive. What are the results? My guess is the drive will need a data recovery operation performed to save your data.

 

[dennischu22]

I ran the Western Digital DLGDIAG test and this is the result that I got.

Is this an indication that the drive is on its way out? What kind of data recovery tools would you recommend?

 

[FreeDataRecovery]

Yes your drive is failing. What you can try to do is clone the drive to a new good drive and attempt to recover data from the clone. It's a bit difficult if you have not done it before.

One of the better tools for this is R-Studio

 

[dennischu22]

FreeDataRecovery,

Thanks for the help so far. Is there any sort of guide to orient me on how to recover from the cloned drive? I haven't done this before, but I damn will try to learn.

 

[FreeDataRecovery]

R-Studio has a 200 page manual. Basicly everything depends on how successful you are making the clone. With luck you may be able to open the clone normally with Windows Explorer and see your data.

 

[dennischu22]

Will do. I'll give it a try tonight. Thanks again for the tips man.