I have a beautiful little Western Digital 120GB drive here. It just came
back from the editor's and now will not spin up. When it gets power, it
beeps twice, waits a few seconds, beeps twice, etc. The model number is
WD1200JB.
I have never seen this before. Any suggestions? Is this drive a candidate
for the freezer trick?
--HC
If it's not spinning it's probably dead. You could guess
whether it's the circuit board or mechanicals, examine
circuit board and try the freezer.
Unless the data is valuable (worth a few thousand$) to
recover professionally, about the only thing left to try is
removing the circuit board and swapping in a different one,
and last resort is opening the drive in as clean an
environement as possible (I suggest wearing clean latex
gloves and inside a large freezer baggie) and manually
trying to free up the spindle.
That will certainly not be good in the medium or long term
but in the short term it might allow quickly copying off
some data if not all of it. I have successfully done so and
the drive only had a few bad sectors BUT while copying off
the data it seized up and jumped a few inches across the
desk, to never spin again.... Did get a few hundred MB of
data though, as was the goal. Tried same on another drive
and it kept seizing up before any chance to copy off, though
"maybe" if i'd been quick with a USB enclosure, something
where it could be hot-plugged, but it's hard to say now.
