This 500GB Western Digital My Passport Studio came in on friday, its beeps when plugged in. Lets have a closer look.

Western digital my passport USB external hard drive

WDBALG5000ABK western digital hard drive

Short video of a beeping hard drive that just came in for data recovery. Catch more jobs at http://www.datarecovery.co.uk/latest-data-recovery-jobs/

Here is a video of the beeping hard drive inside the western digital my passport. Im not convinced that this was the original hard drive but it may have been. Anyway its beeping so we will need to open it up and see whats doing on.

Here we can see the heads stuck just before the ramp. This drive has been dropped 100%, I can always tell just by looking at a drive. We will need to remove the ramp and get the heads out and replace them.

Removing the ramp on this western digital my passport drive to get the heads out. Next we need to have a look and see how bad the damage is

These 2 little black squares are called sliders, when they come off the heads and the drive has encountered some serious force. This is not a good sign.

Ok the little black things stuck to the lid (or the roof) as I call it can be seen missing here , one is present and 2 are missing. This means metal on metal contact with the platter. We need to replace the heads and cross fingers on this one. No ot… — Ok the little black things stuck to the lid (or the roof) as I call it can be seen missing here , one is present and 2 are missing. This means metal on metal contact with the platter. We need to replace the heads and cross fingers on this one. No other way to do it

Lets have a look thru a box of western digital donor drives for compatible parts

Found a nice donor drive, this one has 4 heads instead of 3, this is ok tho. We can change the head map to mimic the drive that we are recovering.

Will get back on this one again Monday, got 4 other western digital passports that I am working on, one of them is urgent from London.