How to Fix a Dead Western Digital Hard Drive - HDD Repair

everybody so it's gonna talk today about repairing this mechanical hard drive you still see these even today a lot of computers have them I just know some of the eye mechs actually still have them even the newest ones you can still get a mechanical hard drive it's gonna pretty much look like this it's a big thick one well it's pretty heavy still this one's a little bit older of course this is an IDE drive you can see by the bottom of it that has all these different pins and this is probably about twenty years old now there is a big difference between these this one it may be something a little bit newer it's just made of interface and let me show you that real quick alright so we do have this hard drive here it's a mechanical hard drive it's probably about 20 years old or so but it looks pretty familiar if you look at this one versus a newer one you kind of say oh yeah this is about it that's this is kind of what it looks like anyway right it still looks about the same the main thing with this this separate hard drive and the older ones that you probably see more back in the day would probably be the connection as a molex for the power and then the rest of the pins are for the data as well and usually you can see them they actually do come with jumpers every now and then and you'll notice that usually on the hard drive they do say certain things about jumpers on it like master slave or anything and they usually do tell you that the correct cable setting that goes on the drive usually do come with a jumper compared to this one this is a bit newer it has a different type of connection that we even used today it's a static connection and the SATA connection you can see that in not just mechanical hard drives like this and you can also see the laptop mechanical hard drives laptop solid-state drives solid-state drives in general they're very it's a very very popular connection I usually do pretty good speeds too but it's a very standard connection that's been out for a very very long time now it's been a standard for a very long time and you're not gonna really see these go away too much because as storage size increases as you can see if you're doing any type of video work if you're do playing a lot of games or anything you can tell storage is exponentially growing and you really need storages at least one terrible two terabytes or and you can go all the way up to they have 16 terabyte drives they have a lot of different type of mechanical hard drives for that just the prices are a lot cheaper than getting a solid-state drive for the same exact cost like a two terabyte solid-state drive is extremely expensive compared to a mechanical hard drive you could probably be saving several hundreds of dollars it's getting a bunch of mechanical hard drives or just the price most people do still go with these two mechanical hard drives and I dunno a flash storage has been cheap for a little bit now it's been getting cheaper and then eventually can go back up and once that happens again and as storage pages get even bigger and compression doesn't really seem to be a thing right now that we're concerned about so when you see games even have updates for 80 gigs 100 gigs and you're making 4k files and now even we have a KETV is coming out we need more storage space than we ever did before so the mechanical drives are probably still gonna be around for a very very long time so I'm for a little rain about that but I just like you know to talk about this just kind of make you guys a little bit aware but easier to almost exactly the same there are 3.5 inch drives mechanical drives it doesn't matter how much older you usually see technology get a little bit slimmer or a little bit better you can see they also do have a board so for the newer one it's pretty straightforward any type of static connection usually what you can do for these you can get you can get an external reader that does for seta what you can do just plug it in and then you could turn it on of course you see the blue dot and usually once that if it blinks a little bit that means it's reading and you keys you see on the computer so just give it always some time before you give up on it you can feel the disks bending and everything so just wait for it to blink does these older drives take a little bit of time you can see this is taking a little time but in blinking and now something comes up on my computer that means I can see it it's totally fine so always when you remove these two you always want to safely remove it eject the device always because they could be and still be working and running in the background so always do that once it says safely move you can just turn off and remove it now on the contrast for the one we have here you need usually a special type of connection I'm not too sure about the connection if they have is something like like this one for it like an external because obviously there's pins and you want to shove something in there with pins because I could mess it up or something so we used to have ones that have two different types of connections and of course this one's going to be more the IDE connection so this is going to plug IDE SATA to USB and that's just going to be for data and then you also have this one here was a molex connection I usually use it for power so if we plug it in and then we try and usually right when you plug into molex one you can start feeling it and for this one it's just completely dead there's no power there's nothing much I plug it in even here because there's no power anyway there's really no point of plugging in the USB because this thing should leave spin right when that power is plugged in cuz the data all it is the data is just for it to read so this thing is completely dead what we want to do is we want to remove this board here because the board is what control is the power on and power off so if this is completely dead this disk isn't spinning then the board must be a problem so we do actually have a donor board here and if you see it it looks just about exactly the same on the back it's pretty close do you have to get exactly that same model the same serial number you want to get the same firmware the same place it's made just as close to you possibly can you really want to match the chips up so that's most important thing let's just go swap this and see if it just works right away so I'm just going to do that and for these you can just use these little Torx screws screwdrivers they're usually very similar to the ones you use it for macbook screens here we did that so all they come with is a few Torx screws let's just remove it right and you can see just come to roll up right away just like that and you can see the connection here that actually touches with the metal on the drive itself that makes contact and those are really important as well but you can see that comes up and you can see it's very similar if not exactly the same but let's just swap it out so and hopefully that works let's take this up all right and let's just put this in and see if it works if it seats totally fine all right and most important thing to not just to screw but also you wanna make sure this is making contact which it is it should automatically fall right in so now let's try this time and see if it does anything so we're going to plug in or I D connection there and then we're gonna plug in our molex which is the power and right when I plug this in I expect this at least spin or make some you can usually feel it spin right when you plug a sense we put my mic next to it you see if you can hear it it is spinning so let's try connecting it and see if it comes up so you're good you got you really hear it spin there so now I'm gonna try connect it to my computer see if there's anything you can feel it to if you can't hear try to just feel with your hand you can feel maybe a little vibration or something now this one is a little bit more difficult because there's no real indicator light or anything for what we have here alright so I did check it it doesn't look like it's coming on my computer at all it's just spinning so good thing we got the power on bad thing we still have an issue we still can't get the data so what it does look like it might be we can take this off now you take out the power because we don't get anymore of course boards are different than made in different places of the manufacturer a little bit differently some of the chips could be a little bit different the firmware could be different and we're really gonna focus on that the firmware and what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a look under the microscope when you get these types of boards you need it exactly the same and sometimes you need donor boards not only just to replace it if this would work that would be great maybe what we want to do is replace the firmware chip on that and see if that's gonna help make it read as you saw before we weren't having trouble powering it on from this board but we were actually having trouble accessing the data so when we plugged it into the USB to see the data that's on there okay so what we're doing here now is just removing the firmware chip and we're going to replace it with the donor one what that's going to do is it's going to allow us to access the data that's on the hard drive so we did replace this chip right here underneath the microscope and let's go put it back and see if it works now so remember before we were able to get actually to afford to power on and we weren't able to see any information that was kind of on the screen so hopefully by replacing the firmware chip that we are able now to at least read the data that's on the hard drive so let's put it back on one of the most important things you want to do is make sure you hit the contacts here so of course it should just go right in it to fit it should just kind of sit right there and as you screw it in that should obviously make it totally fine so all right now we want to test it so try to give you guys a little bit of my screen oh it's gonna work I can see kind of little BS there coming up but it's fine so I'm going to connect first of course what you want to do is you want to make sure you connect this don't do the power first because you can short something so I do like we did last time just connect a little adapter here we're very lucky we have an adapter for these but of course you know we're computer shop so it's nice to happen just plug this in the plug in the molex now spinning let's connected here alright you can kind of see the screen there that sees anything just pops up okay this is my let's click it cuz it come up alright we got a little error there but that's good at least we're reading something yeah let me just swap it real quick so we can show ya alright you can see here actually that's a my book II yeah of course we got an error as well but it does allow it works pretty well so going pretty smooth we definitely want to make sure you transfer the data now because at any moment you know anything this isn't a very stable drive so you definitely want to transfer the data as soon as you possibly can and we don't want to really use this ever again really just because it's not too stable so let's make sure we transfer everything and that should be just about it so it's good we did replace the component on the board that does work now we were able to get the data off for the customer but we typically like to get these normal boards fixed because getting a donor board there can always be a problem with it you know there can just it could just be incompatible in general it could be a little bit like there could be different chips on there that aren't compatible with the normal board that we have of course it can get really expensive and sometimes they just you're just not sure if they're gonna work it at all like sometimes it's not the place to get because their donor boards so there could be more problems with it but in this case we were pretty lucky we were just able to replace the firmware chip on there and it was able to power on and work with a donor board which is fantastic so yeah in the future we will try to do maybe another video where we can do more of the starter chip or something else when it's completely dead we'll try and make another video maybe that in the future but you guys kind of do see a lot of work involved with this with these types of data and repairs even these older drives nowadays we still do recover from them because they're still really nice drives they still worry they used to be really nice drives back in the day and they're still kind of the same technology if you can see if this is a 20 year old one and then we showed you the differences between that and the newer ones today just pretty much the different type of connection that's on there but the board's very similar just a little bit of it so what do you guys do storage for do you guys use like a lot of storage for like video do you guys have videos do you guys stream a bit you guys do play a lot of games or anything I dunno a lots going on these mechanical hard drives would probably see a lot be still more even in the future they don't really seem to be going away because flash can get more expensive over time and of course the same capacity of like a 2 terabyte SSD is a very expensive compared to a 2 terabyte mechanical Drive several hundred dollars more usually and the prices do fluctuate a lot with the flash you'll see some sometimes it can be very cheap and then it can get very expensive really fast the price to keep going up and down it seems like that these mechanical hard drives are kind of steadied where it's gonna be you do see super high capacity mechanical drives still being made today this we have more 4k footage if you watch if you there's a lot more 4k footage being available now they're even making a KTV so to even have all that data on a hard drive or even a disc is going to be really something else so unless we see super compression methods it really don't see anything else really changing at a time in the future there's a big demand for that still even out today you can see a lot of other companies do day of cover ease we do them a lot here as well we love to work on them and it's it's a great feeling to to get the data off especially when you when people believe that they don't have any hope and then we give them hope so it's always a good thing as well anyways guys I hope you enjoyed watching I'll leave right down below also it really just helped us a lot and we'll see you guys the next video thanks flat

Channel: lapfix

Views: 172,149

Keywords: How to fix a dead western digital, fix dead Western Digital drive, Wd hard disk repair, fixing dead hard drive, dead hard drive fix, dead hard drive, How to fix a daed western digital, Hdd repair, dead hard drive recovery, Western Digital hard drive, desktop hdd repair, ide hdd jumper settings, IDE HDD Recovery, western digital, Desktop HDD

Id: sVt2jnK7Aqg

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020