Dead WD4000KD hard drive. Can anyone help?

iwb

I wonder if anyone can help?

I use my PC as a server for video. This evening I saw the dreaded blue screen of death on it but at the same time, video was still streaming to the set top box. I rebooted the computer to get rid of the bsod and of course streaming stopped. It blue screened again and I tried a second time. I then noticed the bios reporting that it couldn't find the drive. I tried rebooting a few more times and once it reported the drive as present but didn't boot into windows and never again.

I had a look and the drive was quite warm to the touch. It has been working fine for about two years, so I don't think that was the issue but not sure.

It spins up just fine and no bad noises or other obvious problems. I have a 500GB sata drive also connected to the PC in an external eSATA case which is working fine, so I took it out of its case and put in the 400GB drive. That way, I can hear and see it clearly. It didn't help at all, which troubleshoots cables and any other physical connection issue.

I tried a few recovery tools but none of them find the drive either. I guess they wouldn't if the bios can't.

I allowed it to cool down completely before trying it again, but still nothing.

Any advice would be very welcome as I have lots of video on there that isn't backed up. Not the end of the world but more than a little annoying all the same.

It is also the drive that windows is on and I am not looking forward to doing everything from scratch again. Recovering data from it would make things a lot easier.

Does anyone have a used but working WD4000KD perhaps? (I think it is an odd size but you never know) If I can find another one, I will try to swap out the circuit board to see if that brings it back.

Thanks.

thatoneitguy

Go here and download the ISO and burn to CD if you can. Boot the newly burned CD and see if if it can see your hard drive. Alternatively, if you have another computer you can take your HD out and put it in an external enclosure to see if it mounts. No noise is a good thing and the fact that it was warm to the touch doesn't mean too much, they can get warm, especially in a case that isn't well ventilated.

iwb

Thanks very much for the reply. What is minipe? It is nearly 500Mb so I will be a while downloading it. Once I have tried it, I will report back.

Thanks again.

thatoneitguy

Sorry, should have explained it better. MiniPE is a version of Windows that has been modified to fit on a CD and boot into functional GUI, like a linux live CD. It also has tools for all kinds of situations. I never leave home with out a copy, I've rescued loads of machines with this. Good luck!

iwb

I tried it. Great CD. There are too many tools. Hard to know which to use. I have used Hirens Boot CD in the past but this is more user friendly.

I guess I need to load a driver for SATA as none of the applications seem to find the good drive on the same controller, so they are sure as hell not going to find the bad one.

I saw 'press F6 to add third party....' flash up momentarily. I hope it doesn't require a floppy.

Thanks.

iwb

No luck with anything I have tried to date. I am fairly sure it is dead from a hardware point of view at this stage. I have posted a wanted ad for another one. If anyone has one, either working or dead with different symptoms, please let me know.

Thanks.

iwb

Just to update this thread. Rather bizarre really but to explain;

There is no way I can get the WD4000KD drive to be recognised by the motherboard but I put in a new WD SATA drive and rebuilt the machine with it to get me back up and running.

I was about to send the drive away and pay €300 to get the data recovered but just for pigiron, I decided to try it with another SATA machine. Lo and behold, it worked just fine!

So, the motherboard that won't recognise the 4000 works fine with a new 500GB drive and the old drive works fine in another machine.

The troublesome motherboard is an Asus P5V VM-DH.

Thanks for all your help.