ahhh my 120 Gb Western Digital Hard Drive died! it sucks really bad bc i lost like all my music and music videos and programs that i had....when i start up the computer it sometimes detects it and sometimes doesnt...and even if i does detect it, it still wont boot.....it jus makes clicking noises and sounds like its trying to spin up :( its only a year old too...oh well i guess ill send it back to western digital and get another one since it has a 3 yr warranty and then jus reinstall everything unless any of u guys have any ideas of what i can do...one of my friends told me to put it in a plastic bag and then in the freezer for like 2 hrs but hes not sure y he said that he heard that it sometimes works like that so i dunno if im going to do that.... :? but yea im on my laptop hooked up to my mouse keyboard and monitor for now and prob going to send back the drive after this weekend oh well....wow this turned out to be a lot hehe

You have a spare hd? Slave the bad one in another pc. Even with parts of the hard drive bad, you will be surprised what you can pull off of it this way.

I have heard of freezing them, tapping them, and about 10 other ways to "fix" them. You can try. It may or may not help. The fact still remains that something is going wrong with the HD and it will enevidably fail permanently if it hasn't already.

yea i already tried to hook it up to another computer as a slave with no success it didnt see it in windows

Yea, it'* gone then. The only other chance of recovering anything would be a proffessional HD recovering company... but I highly doubt you want to pay that much for something like this.

Better luck with your next one.

yep i have no intention whatsoever to pay those ppl to retrieve my data heheh yea hopefully this next one will be good

it really does suck when that happens. If I were you, I'd buy a bunch of CD R'* and make sure I keep everything backed up all the time. It'* worth the extra time.

WAIT! It'* so funny you speak of this, because my WD 80gb SE took a crap. I used a ton of my utilities but was unsuccessful. Even the WD Lifeguard Disk told me it was gone. Well, what I did was, I put in my XP CD and did a repair reinstall of Windows. It got me back in, but everything was slow. It was just enough to pull my files on to a spare and get a replacement drive.

If you have XP, or even 2000 maybe, try the reinstallation. You won't lose your files with the repair installation. If that doesn't work, then I guess there'* no hope.


When you get your new hard drive in, install Windows and all your drivers and programs, and download Norton Ghost. Make a Ghost image of your partition in 650MB chunks on to a different drive. Then, burn those to a CD. This way, if you lose it again, you can go back to normal in no time. Also, there is a way in Windows XP where you can do a Differential Backup of folders. I would to that with your Documents and Settings folders under your profile. This way, you are totally covered.


Hope it works out for ya. I know it sucks, cause I am going through it right now.

There'* hope yet, but the down side is that it costs you a new drive. To get a new one from the warranty, you'd have to send in the old one.

If you buy another HD of the exact same model, you can switch the circuit bords of the drives and have a chance of recovering data. Unless, that is, the problem is mechanical.

I have recovered some important data from a drive where the PC was in some places FUSED by lightning and smoked to ****. Whatever data was under the heads at the time of the shock was corrupted, but I managed to save enough data to make it worthwhile.

There is little danger of damaging the new circuit borad so wether it works or not, you can put it back onto the good drive and continue using it.

Good luck.............

Freezing the HD is never a good idea.... I've seen it done successfully for laptop and phone batteries, but you should never do it to a HD.

You said you tried slaving it off another controller, but Windows didn't see it.... do you know if it was seen in the BIOS? Were the jumpers set correctly (master/slave).

Were you using the same type of file system on the other computer? ie NTFS or FAT32? Same OS? It doesn't need to be the same, but a Win98 (using FAT32) will not see a WinXP/NT/2000 using NTFS.

yea it didnt see it in the bios either... :( it sounds like its trying to spin up and makes clicking noises and it takes a long time to try to detect it ....the jumpers are set right so i should work but im pretty sure its mechanical failure or something...