What's wrong with my hard drive?

[DarkRogue]

Hello,

I want to see if anyone has any idea what may be wrong with my hard drive.

Last night I noticed that one of my hard drives was missing from the "My Computer" explorer.
I think it actually may have been gone for close to a week, but since it was only a data storage drive, I never noticed because I rarely access it.

In any case, it was missing, and that was worrying, so I decided to reboot to see if that fixed anything. Unfortunately, it didn't help. It was late, so I shut down the PC (it normally runs 24/7 doing various tasks) and deal with it today. It's currently in the freezer as I guess if that works, it'd be nice. I would like to know if anyone has any idea what is wrong with it though.

When I booted this morning (and last night when I discovered the issue) it took XP a lot longer than normal to boot up, I assume because it was trying to initialize the failed drive or something. XP does not seem to know it exists, nor does device manager or disk management. It was a SATA drive hooked up using AHCI (which means WD's Diagnostic tools are worthless since it apparently can't communicate with AHCI drives.)

Now, XP doesn't see it, but the BIOS kind of does. It's not listed in the actual BIOS, but during the startup routines when it scans the drives for AHCI, it detects that there are 6 ports and 6 devices connected, but it can only "find" 5 drives responding, and simply waits for the 6th until it times out and proceeds with the boot. After I pulled the offending drive, during this same process, it would now detect 6 ports and only 5 drives connected. This seems to indicate that it knows its there, but that it's just not responding or something.

I have a couple Icy Dock eSATA/USB enclosures, so I shut down the PC again and pulled out the drive into an enclosure. I hooked it up via USB to my laptop and turned it on. The laptop detected the enclosure and started attempting to set up the drivers, but again, the drive could not be found. This time though, device manager actually did pick up the drive and detected it properly as a WD5000AAKS, but that was the extent of its knowledge. It wouldn't assign it a drive letter for me to access the data. Disk management unfortunately still didn't see it.

I then switched it over to my PC, which booted normally after removing the failed drive, and turned it on via eSATA. At this point, event manager started giving me errors with the drive timing out, with a pause on my PC every time it timed out. At this point, I shut it down and tossed it into the freezer.

Prior to that though, I was trying to listen for any abnormalities while it was in the enclosure. It spun up just fine as far as I can tell, and I don't hear any clicking from it. Could it be an issue with the PCB on it?

There has been some annoyances before though, and the event log is filled with entries with errors and warnings about cache not being flushed to disk or something, but I can never figure out which drive it's referring to because the port numbers and drive letters don't match up to what's reported in the BIOS or whatnot. I think it's just time to upgrade all the drives with newer ones.

Either way, at this point I'm just going to try to recover what data I have on it and RMA the thing, but it would be nice to know wtf is wrong with it. I know people will say something along the lines of 'should've made backups.' Funny thing is I was in the middle of doing just that - I was busy sorting out all the data on my other active/download drives in preparation for copying everything on all my drives over to a 1.5TB drive I purchased specifically to hold a copy of all my data. Since this drive held static, long-term storage data, it was already sorted, and I never noticed it missing. I guess it's a kick in the nuts for me waiting too long to get going with my backups, but I can't really do anything about it now.

So - anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

 

[Russwinters]

the freezer probably sealed it's fate into "Davy Jones locker".


Theres a chance it is still recoverable, but you need to take it out of the freezer, and let it sit and do not turn it on for about 24-48 hours.


next, it's going to need professional DR service, there no choice with these new WD drives. The family is called ROYL series, and they are designed much different from the old WD, where the good ol' circuit board swaps of old do not work anymore, you need specialist tools, and quite a bit of experience/practice to get these guys working again.

Thats only if it's a circuit board/ firmware issue.

Don't even get me started if it is a mechanical issue, WD head-stack alignment is most DR techs nightmare, I can do lower density drives, but these guys I can't even do yet; I am still developing my tool/method.

I can take a look at it for you for no cost (besides shipping to me) It would go through my employer, You can PM me if you are interested. But be warned most of these cases arn't cheap (even from my company, where we do thing for a nice amount less the Ontrack, etc)


Regards,

 

[Elixer]

the freezer probably sealed it's fate into "Davy Jones locker".

Theres a chance it is still recoverable, but you need to take it out of the freezer, and let it sit and do not turn it on for about 24-48 hours.

Just curious, why do you say this?
While I know the freezer trick doesn't work for everyone, it has worked in the past for me, and I just ran it while it was still sub-zero.

 

[Russwinters]

the freezer is a crap shoot.

It could be that the circuit board is the issue and the swelling of the board causes the joints to reconnect, or the MCU is overheating and since it is frozen it will work for a short period of time.

The negative is that there is lubricant on all HDD, and this lubricant will get damaged at freezing temps, and can cause it to lift, the heads will crash into the lifted areas of lubricant and die, forever, and will need to be replaced (if they didn't need to be already)

Also, when you take the drive out of the freezer no matter what condensation is going to build up inside the drive. Hard drives are not air tight they have several openings that are guarded by a filter, but of course water vapor can make it through these filters.

So now you will have droplets of water for the heads to crash into.

HDD heads on todays drives can only be seen well under 200x magnification, and fly at a height of ~5nm from the surface, a particle of dust is ~30nm in circumference. Basically a small speck of dust is a skyscraper in comparison to the heads.

 

[DarkRogue]

Thanks for the response, Russ.

I am also wondering why the freezer might have sealed its fate.
The only thing I can think of is condensation forming upon re-powering the drive.
I tried to keep it as dry as possible though. Unfortunately, I had no expectation of it working, and after 13 hours in the freezer (ziplock bag, paper towels, silica gel) it's still not initializing.

It's presenting the same symptoms as before; it'll spin up without any clicking (besides a couple initial seek noises) and then proceed to sit there spinning and not doing much else. Connecting via eSATA causes an unknown disk to appear in device manager, with the event log stating

The device, \Device\Harddisk5\D, is not ready for access yet.

and then lots of

The device, \Device\Scsi\Jraid1, did not respond within the timeout period.

Each time I get the second message, the entire system pauses, I assume because it's still waiting for the drive.

I then tried connecting it to USB instead, and as with the laptop, new hardware wizard will pop up and find the WD5000AAKS, but then fail to initialize it. This doesn't cause my system to pause, but I do hear the drive spin up, then suddenly spin down and spin back up again. Event manager logs the following during this:

The device, \Device\Harddisk5\D, is not ready for access yet.

followed by

The device 'Disk drive' (SCSI\Disk&Ven_WDC&Prod_WD5000AAKS-00YGA&Rev_210.\5&2cfd9831&0&010) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

In either case, disk management could not pick it up.

From some Googling around, I think this may be a corrupted firmware issue, or something. I could be wrong, but it's my feeling right now after reading about it and comparing with what I see here. The model of the drive is a WD5000AAKS-00GYA0, but when I plugged it in via USB, it briefly came up and claimed it was an -00GYA2.

Russ, I may take you up on that offer, if just so I can get some questions answered, although even with discounts, from the prices I see online, it's probably going to be way more than a couple hundred bucks.

 

[Russwinters]

It's circuit board,

I have seen these symptoms a lot on these drives, they have a problem with the MCU that causes this.


The problem is that these drives don't have an external EEPROM (U12 marked on board)

the ROM is IN the MCU. For this reason you need to do either:

Pull the ROM data embedded from the CPU, for this you will need tools that cost ~12k

Rebuild the ROM by accessing the firmware on drive, to do this you need to find a drive with the same firmware version, and then you must build a LDR(Loader) using specialist tools, in fact the same tool that costs 12k.

Basically, there is no easy way to fix these drives. It used to be just swap the PCB, swap the EEPROM and go on your merry way, but unfortunately HDD manufacturer are looking to integrate everything into one chip to save money, but it makes things 1000x harder for recovery if their chips die.

 

[DarkRogue]

Oh, that sucks.. At least it's probably not mechanical failure, I guess.

In any case, what do you think something like this would cost to repair or to just pull the data? It's probably more than it's worth at this point, but I am curious. I know you mentioned that the equipment cost 12k, but I don't know if that's what the customer gets charged, unless they're one-time-use tools or something. I do have another working 500GB drive that I purchased at the same time, and they look identical, but from Googling around, it probably won't work.

At this point I will probably just replace that drive too; no idea when it will suddenly flake out.