WD drive spins up and die

[ostlind]

I own a one month old Elements External USB-disk 500GB. It has worked jut fine until a couple of days ago when a hard item fell down on the box. This resulted in that shortcuts to applications on that disk did no longer work, however the applications could be started from Windows Explorer, and performance got slower. When I pulled out the USB-cable the blue LED did not go off. I re-inserted the USB connector and the computer made a tone meaning that a USB-device was attached but no disk showed in Windows Explorer. I pulled out the power-cable to stop it.
After proper re-connecting of the drive, the disk spins up and remain running until the "beep" comes and then it spins down. The WD Lifeguard Diagnostics recognise the drive as being 2TB and no tests are possible to run as it is not assigned a drive letter.

What can I do to force it to get upp and running, not spinning down? Before stopping it the disk was readable so it may be possible to access it, to get backups on some urgent files?
Is there any jumper setting and/or software that would enable such function? I currently own R-Studio as a recovery tool which can make a bit-for-bit image to laborate with.

[Old Thrashbarg]

First thing I'd do is pull the disk out of the enclosure and hook it up inside your computer. That way you can take the enclosure out of the equation, see if the drive itself still works. It sounds like it might be an enclosure problem, judging by your description of how it's acting, so there's a decent chance it'll work with the drive directly hooked up to IDE (SATA?).

Doing so will prolly screw up the warranty, but it sounds like the files on the drive are the more important consideration at the moment.

[ostlind]

Thanks for your reply! I've already broken the warranty by opening the enclosure and connected the SATA-disk directly to another computer. The symptom remain, the disk spins up and then stop spinning before a drive letter gets assigned.
I belive that if I can get it to keep spinning it may be able to detect and access...

[Old Thrashbarg]

Well, first thing to do is not to play with it too much. The drive is dead, and the more you try to use it, the less chance you'll have of being able to recover data off it.

The usual procedure for recovery is as follows:

Put the drive in the freezer for an hour or so. Then quickly take it and plug it into your computer. I usually keep it vertical, but I'm not sure if that really makes a difference or not. You'll only have a few minutes before the drive warms back up, so be quick about it. This also doesn't work every time, but it's worth a shot.

It would help if your drive uses the SATA power connector, which is hot-pluggable. Then you could enable the hot-swap option for your SATA controller, allowing you to take the drive from the freezer and plug it straght into the running machine, rather than waiting the extra couple minutes for the machine to boot up. (If the drive uses a molex, though, you can't do that.)

If the freezer trick doesn't work, try moving the drive around in different orientations... vertical, horizontal, upside-down, etc.

Last resort would be to put the drive on a flat surface, label-side up. While it's running, and when you hear it click off, take your palm, and, as evenly across the drive surface as you can, slap it. Not too hard, but firmly. Like I said, this is a last resort, but sometimes jarring it like that can give it just enough of a boost to get it going for a few minutes.