Data Recovery from Western Digital WD series hard disk drives

WD Protégé: WD1600AB (160Gb), WD1200AB (120Gb), WD800EB (80Gb), WD600EB (60Gb), WD400EB (40Gb), WD200EB (20Gb)

WD Caviar: WD2500BB (250Gb), WD2000BB (250Gb), WD1600BB (160Gb), WD1200BB (120Gb), WD800BB (80Gb), WD400BB (40Gb), WD200BB (20Gb)

Early WD Caviar model numbers: WD75AA, WD84AA, WD102AA, WD102BA, WD136AA, WD136BA, WD153AA, WD153BA, WD205AA, WD205BA, WD307AA, WD450AA

Problems: These drives can sometimes suffer damage to their firmware zone causing the data they contain to become inaccessible.

Symptoms: When powering the machine up, the system will hang for a few seconds when the BIOS attempts to recognise the hard disk. The hard disk may be recognised correctly or may not be recognised at all. In each case, the performance of the drive will appear very slow and the drive will eventually fail altogether.

What's the cause of this failure?: One or more of the reasons below are often the cause of failure -

Specific Western Digital drive failure information:

• Faults and problems on non noisy Western Digital Caviar hard disk drives
• Faults and problems on noisy Western Digital Caviar hard disk drives
• Faults and failure symptoms on early Western Digital Caviar hard disk drives
• Symptoms / Recovering data from Western Digital drives with corrupt firmware
• Back to our main Western Digital problem specific page
• Western Digital's WD Caviar 'EIDE' data sheet (PDF)
• Western Digital's WD Caviar 'SE' data sheet (PDF)

Please Note: Hard disks made by every manufacturer are subject to these problems. Western Digital hard disks are no more prone to developing them than any other manufacturers hard disk. We are able to provide more comprehensive information for Western Digital hard disk firmware zone failures because in many cases, the symptoms are much more specific and identifiable.

What if I have one of these drives but the symptoms are different?: This is quite possible. These drives are still prone to all the other problems hard disks suffer from ie. mechanical failure, logical failure, bad sectors etc.

What should I do?: Call the Data Clinic and talk your problem through with us on 0870 140 2525, or fill out our auto-form and we'll call you back

Recovery possibilities: Data Clinic are often able to perform a full data recovery
Please call us on 0870 140 2525

> Back to the MAIN data recovery page

Please note that all modern hard disk drives are manufactured to very high standards, fail infrequently and have very similar rates of reliability.

A Western Digital WD800BB 80Gb hard disk. Found in many PC's, this family of hard disks often function without incident.

The underside of a WB400BB hard disk