Hi, a friend had a 2TB WD Mybook (sata 3.5” hard drive, wd20eads is the model of the drive) and they brought it to me to see if I can recover any data from it. The first thing I did was took the drive out from the enclosure to verify the problem was not in the power supply or the connector cables (since it is not under warranty I was allowed to open it up). So I connected the drive directly to my desktop PC. I noticed it was still clicking. It was not detected by my computer at all. I put it in the freezer and connected it to my computer and even in the freezer it was not detected and it continued to click. That ruled out an overheating problem. I let it warm back up to room temp, and although it clicked several times, the drive was detected on my computer as “allocated space” in the computer management console.
With it detected I tried running a recovery application and within seconds I got an I/O error saying “bad address mark reading sector 1837888 on HD130; do you want to continue”. I hit yes to all and it just skips all the files and it goes to the end and can not end up reading any data.
So I was wondering if I replace the main board on the hard drive with one that is a good match, if it would likely fix the issue, or does the issue seem like it would be more with the drive actuator?