Hard Drive Failed to Boot, Where to start...???

I have a 2TB WD Black HD that is failed to booting. I've been using it as a storage drive for the last couple years. Please help me to know where to start to maybe get it up and alive once more time.
I'm NOT loosing a single file for Clients but family photos of my kids and vacations
Thank you in advance!

If it has a 'wall wart', try using a different wall wart (correct voltage, correct center pin polarity, correct Amps output). If the AC plug goes into the case without wall wart, you can try to remove the harddrive from the enclosure and put it into a 'docking station'...the harddrive itself may be fine, and the support electronics in the enclosure are hosed.

What are the symptoms if any---besides fails to boot? Do you hear the drive making any unusual noise?

I recently had a Black WD 1 TB drive fail in a system after less than 10 months of use. The drive would work for a few minutes, and then fail to boot. I am waiting for WD to send the replacement.


Edit:
If you are using the drive in an external enclosure, you might consider opening the enclosure, and putting the drive in your machine. Many times I have seen the interface electronics fail, while the
drive itself is fine.


110yd

Right, I would try doing what the others have said and have another drive on hand so that if it does boot, you have somewhere to immediately copy the data to.
Even if worst comes to worst, spinning drives are extremely robust devices, and if you consider your data worth it, there are services that'll recover your data even if the disk flat out dies. Nothing can simply strip data off a magnetic platter unless you physically destroy the disk, which is why datacenters are required to crush drives that have "failed".

You are probably using USB so try a known reliable cable. Also, if you use a USB hub, try the drive with a direct connection to the PC, as opposed to plugging it in to the monitor or keyboard accesory USB port.

110yd wrote in post #17720883
What are the symptoms if any---besides fails to boot? Do you hear the drive making any unusual noise?

I recently had a Black WD 1 TB drive fail in a system after less than 10 months of use. The drive would work for a few minutes, and then fail to boot. I am waiting for WD to send the replacement.


Edit:
If you are using the drive in an external enclosure, you might consider opening the enclosure, and putting the drive in your machine. Many times I have seen the interface electronics fail, while the
drive itself is fine.


110yd

Some harddrives in external enclosures can be heard to 'click'...'click'... as they attempt to start up, others don't make that noise but blink a light. Different manufactures/models of harddrives differ in their inherent noise.
The prolonged clicking/blinking is one indicator of failed/deteriorated wallwart or 120V-to-12V circuit of the enclosure, which can well mean the HD itself is fine.

Having had 2 trial external hd cadies fail, both were silent, one started and shut down as soon as the dc power plug was inserted, then as the data matters to you. My advice is buy a reasonable caddy with lots of good refs from amazon. Also check how many bad reviews it had.

Unlike the above advice - and I am not saying either is right or wrong.
My experience with a pro hp laptop was when first booting up, it just clicked.
There were 3.brilliant techies, all 3 said it was us. I think they said the hard disc controller was finished.

As there were contracts worth over £8M on there, they swapped the disc to 2 other laptops - no sucess.
The sort of good news was the data was recoverable from a specialist company. Think they said these people " mount" the disc on a universal controller. It was a straight drive so no caddy to confuse the issue.

BTW the companys auto backup system, had actually got everything. So it was never proved but the specialist company charged a small fee, to determine if it could be recovered, and then if you went ahead guarranteed the rest of the fee plus the investigative fee if they could not "materially recover the majority of the data" So they were not con men. And one of our chaps said one of the clients had a fire and thry got back 90% of the data.
The bad news is if I remember the trial fee was £200 and the actual recovery was another £500 and that was a few years ago.

My bet is its the caddy. So maybe £20 will do it.
My bad experience was with ones that cost about £9 - imo too cheap.

Thank you all for your tips! I do not have much time to look into take care of this drive anytime soon but I must when I am less busy. Thank you again!!! Btw, it is an internal drive not external.

There are forensic quality data recovery labs that can recover data simply from the platters of the disc, they don't need the whole drive. Actually they can recover data that has been written over several times too, although that may well not be as effective. I went to a couple of data security and recovery seminars back in the 90's where this was the subject. Of course this only applies to spinning magnetic discs, not NAND Flash drives, no platters in there, only chips.

Alan

Tigerkn wrote in post #17722090
Thank you all for your tips! I do not have much time to look into take care of this drive anytime soon but I must when I am less busy. Thank you again!!! Btw, it is an internal drive not external.

Take 10 seconds of your time and tell us the symptoms as someone above asked.

Does it make a sound that is abnormal and wasn't there before?
Does it appear in BIOS? Hint, go look in BIOS.
Does it appear in Disk Manager (Windows) but simply not get a drive letter assigned?
Have you moved it from one SATA port to another?
Have you moved it from one power supply cable to another?

Usually these drives lose their table, the data is there. There is free recovery for this, it just is intensive and takes time. So if you're that busy, you may have to choose to recover or lose your data.

Not to be cheeky, but I do hope at the very least this spurs you to really care about redundancy. Ie, having a backup of your storage backup.

Very best,