www.deadharddrive.com

[Asymptote]

I successfully recovered my WD80AB-22CBA1 by purchasing a PCB with the same model number from a company called UltraTech. They were great.

The drive fired up, and at that time I could have removed all of my files and trashed the drive.

After a while, the HD started acting quite erratic. First thing, the drive went INCREDIBLY slow. I ran a disk check using the WD utility: SMART failure for random read or something like that. The drive test passed before the PCB burned out.

I ran CHKDSK (big mistake) and it detected a ton of damaged files. After that, many of my programs stopped working. No big deal...just reinstalled the programs and all was fine.

Then my Windows installation became corrupt (my guess is that files were damaged) and all USB functionality became nearly impossible.

I tried backing up the entire drive, which caused Windows to crash repeatedly. I then attempted to reinstall Windows and setup hanged when testing the drive, and CHKDSK would no longer complete its scans of the disk. I finally figured I should probably give up on this.

I was able to boot from a new drive and recover most of my files from the old drive (the working but ready to fail drive). File transfer was extremely slow, and some of my files were not recoverable (Errors "Cannot read from source/disk", "Directory is corrupted and cannot be read", or my favorite, "The disk in the drive is not formatted. Format now?"

All in all, this is a great technique. I believe it is mentioned somewhere on this site that the repaired hard disk should only be used to immediately retrieve your files. I SECOND that.