|
Western Digital RE2-GP Data Recovery Information
Western Digital drives fail and the RE2-GP is no exception to this.
   
Two drives, two problems! I'm working on a Packard Bell Legend 401 computer (P75, 4x CD ROM, 8 MB RAM). The 850 MB Hard drive that came with it died and I am trying to replace it. The BIOS will usually correctly autodetect a 2.1 GB Medalist or a 2.6 GB Medalist.
I have a Maxtor 120 gig IDE hard drive. When I plug it into a system - tried several systems - it plays a series of tones - sounds like an old video game. Drive won't show up in CMOS.
..P Doran, Dorset, UK
When it comes to data recovery one of the most common problems Western Digital hard disks experience is burnt board (PCB).Western Digital manufactures a large portion of the world's hard disk drives. In recent years the company has broken ground in the storage industry with a number of innovations. In 2001, a series of ATA hard disk drives (Special Edition) with an 8MB cache buffer were released at a time when most hard drives ran with only a maximum 2MB of buffer. Then, in 2003, they launched the world's first 10,000RPM Serial ATA hard disk drive, The Raptor, a 36 GB unit with an access time of less than 6ms - followed soon after by a quieter 74GB version. Western Digital drives are vulnerable to overheating. Bad power supply unit's combined with a power surge is usually enough to damage micro chips on the electronics PCB and make the data inaccessible.
RE2-GP. If your drive suffers from an electronic failure then we can recover the data for you. In our data recovery lab we use specialised hardware systems to modify a new PCB electronic board and then use specialised software to rewite corrrect firmware modules to the hard drive. This Western Digital fix helps us recover a large precentage of these electronic damaged drives.Two drives, two problems! I'm working on a Packard Bell Legend 401 computer (P75, 4x CD ROM, 8 MB RAM). The 850 MB Hard drive that came with it died and I am trying to replace it. The BIOS will usually correctly autodetect a 2.1 GB Medalist or a 2.6 GB Medalist.
I have a Maxtor 120 gig IDE hard drive. When I plug it into a system - tried several systems - it plays a series of tones - sounds like an old video game. Drive won't show up in CMOS.
..P Doran, Dorset, UK
Western Digital drives have a tendency to sustain damage to the hard drive's firmware zone thus blocking access to the data on the hard disk. Typically, when the system is booting up, it will hang for a few seconds while the BIOS tries to find the volume. Even though the hard disk may or may not be recognised correctly (if at all) the drive's performance will slow dramatically before it the hard disk fails altogether, other failures include:
- It is not found in BIOS when you boot your computer.
- Identifies the hard drive as its factory alias (for example WDC ROM MODEL-HAWK)
- Shows up with wrong S/N (for example WDC-ROM SN# 254) or capacity,
- Identifies fine but fails to read any data or boot up operating system giving I/O device errors whenever you try to access the sectors on the hard drive.
If you attempt to boot up from such drive or read any data from it you would get "Primary Master Hard Disk Fail" or "No operating system found" or "S.M.A.R.T. Capable But Command Failed" or "Disk boot failure. Insert system disk and press enter", "Hard drive not recognized", "Drive Mount Failure" or some other hard drive boot error.
The Western Digital drive can spin up and the head starts clicking right from the beginning with a regular clicking sound . RE2-GP">More times than not this a sign of bad heads, if this is the case it is very important to perform accurate diagnostics and eliminate a chance of possible firmware corruption or PCB failure that sometimes could also cause clicking.
The drive is a Western Digital(RE2-GP) I have a custom built server that is running a RAID 5 and RAID 1 split backplane. The OS is Windows 2003 and it is running an Adaptec SCSI RAID card. One of the drives recently failed and I went to install the new drive and rebuild the array using the adaptec manager (not in the OS) and it will not recognise the new hard drive. When i put the old drive back in it recognises it but shows that it cannot rebuild it.
..Tim Phillips, London, UK
RE2-GPHeads are normally parked on the parking ramp outside of the platters, but sometimes after a fall or abnormal termination they fail to return to their regular parking position and are left on the surface. Immediately after the motor stops spinning they stick to the ideally smooth surface and it becomes impossible to free them without proper tools and experience. Don't attempt to open the drive by yourself - you will damage the platters and this will make your data unrecoverable.
The last typical Western Digital hard drive issue applies also to all other hard drive makes and models, the problem is called bad sectors. After some period of time the platters were the data is located starts to degrade and bad sectors appear.
Whenever the hard drive attempts to read bad sectors it could start freezing, scratching, ticking and sometimes loud clicking. This leads to further damage to the surface and causes more data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms while reading important files, stop the drive immediately and consider sending it to a data recovery company like ourselves for a free diagnostic. Any further attempts to read the Western Digital drive would just add up to the problems and make more data unrecoverable. In our Data Recovery Lab we use expensive imaging tools that are capable of force reading bad sectors from Western Digital Hard Disks. This is usually the only way to effectively retrieve data from these Drives.
If you experience any of the symptoms described above with your Western Digital RE2-GP please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976. If you hear your Western Digital RE2-GP hhard drive making some other unusual noises please call us on +44 (0) 2890 961976.
|
