Hard drive dying?

[Shadow Conception]

My 500GB Western Digital SATA drive seems to be on its way out. Initially, it was inside my old computer, and it would occasionally not be detected on boot. This could be easily fixed by a reboot or two, and the drive would show up again. Soon after, the motherboard fried, so we assumed the mobo just had a bad SATA controller or something.

Since then, the problem seems to have worsened. The drive is scarcely ever detected inside the new computer (while other IDE and SATA drives are detected perfectly). Inside an external enclosure, it is detected once in a blue moon. That one time it was detected, I tried backing up all the semi-important stuff. Turned out my 250GB partition couldn't hold it all. Additionally, the computer froze after I tried to access the drive. I restarted, and turned on the enclosure again; the HDD isn't being detected again.

So now I'm trying to get the hard drive to get detected, so I can back up the very critical stuff (which should definitely amount to less than 250GB). What exactly could be wrong with the hard drive? Is there any easy way to get all the data off the hard drive?

 

[RebateMonger]

It sounds like you've tried about everything you'd normally try to read a failing drive. The only other thing that could be done without professional equipment would be to change the drive controller PCB board. But I've read that may not be possible with recent high-capacity drives.

If you can't get the drive recognized, there's nothing that can be done outside of a professional data recovery house.

 

[Shadow Conception]

Inside the enclosure, the drive gets picked up as "USB Device" under disk drives (as opposed to WDC [model number]). If I go into Windows 7's disk management, it shows the disk as not being initialized. Should I initialize the disk?

Edit: Here's a picture.

 

[Quiksilver]

Yeah, it's dying.
I had this problem with a brand new wd drive I had bought, it would be detected initially (in bios and windows) but once I killed the power to it the drive wouldn't show up again. I had to completely kill the power (switch off psu and unplug) and clear the capacitors for it to show up again. Replacing the drive fixed it for me.

 

[Shadow Conception]

Yeah, the hard drive is probably gone for good now. If I choose to initialize, just reports back "incorrect function". Damn.

Edit: Also, when I turn the enclosure on, the hard drive spins for a good 30 seconds before just stopping completely (judged by listening to the hard drive spin).

 

[Shadow Conception]

Just a little update: I tried out the hard drive freezer trick. I did exactly these steps:

1) Put the HDD in a sealable sandwich bag
2) Stick the HDD in the freezer for an hour
3) Take it out of the freezer and the bag
4) Quickly stick it back into the enclosure

Now I noticed that colder = better for whatever scientific reason, so I took two sealable sandwich bags and filled them with ice. I then laid one bag of ice directly on top of the HDD, and the other bag on top of the first bag. I changed ice for the bottom bag every 15 minutes (as it would melt), and in turn, the top bag would become the new bottom bag, with the bag of new ice on top. 15 minutes later, bottom bag gets a change of ice and becomes the top bag again.

I dunno if the whole bags of ice thing was needed, but it helped me backup around 100GB of important data, over a 3-4 hour period. That sure is a lot better than the standard freezer trick, which only guarantees around 20 minutes of operating time?

So basically, the freezer trick was a great success. All critical stuff is backed up to the new 320GB HDD, and I'm a happy guy.

 

[RebateMonger]

The "freezer trick" can help if either the bearings or the PCB controller board are overheating. One trick is to use long cables and keep the drive in the freezer throughout the recovery. This is easiest when using a SATA/IDE-to-USB converter cable.