Western Digital Elements 1TB USB3.0 Spins up and then beeps?

Question

Well, today, I unplugged my WD external HDD from my laptop so that I could move it to a different port. I was not using any program that would be accessing the drive at the time. However, when I plugged it back in, I hear no spin up, and a "clunk" - stuck heads, so I gave it some "gentle persuasion" (hit it very gently against my palm while it was trying to spin up, and I then managed to get it spinning, However, now when I power the drive up, It spins up, and I then hear beeping (hardware) and then it spins back down. Windows recognises the drive, as I can see it in device manager, however, It doesn't recognise it as a mountable volume :/ Is there any way I'm getting my data back without going to a scam called data recovery?

Solution

The 'beep' could be coming from the disk read/write head voice coil mechanism or its drive circuitry - that's the bits that move the position of the read/write head array. What you could be hearing is the high current, high frequency drive signal, and it may indicate that either the mechanism is stuck or that it's trying to position the read/write heads somewhere valid, but it can't because there's been a media or electronic failure and its not 'seeing' any data.

Either way, this is not a good sign. Try the diagnostics suggested and if necessary, RMA the drive if it's under warranty.

Comments

[Samir]

Check the connections. Try a different USB cable. If your warranty is up, take it out of the case and put it in a HDD dock station or into a desktop and see if it works. When you say it's recognized, do you see it in Explorer?

[Samir]

You will need to get access to it first and read from it, before you can do any file copy operations. You should have already done so the last time, when it started working again, after you gave it a "jump start". You should not have continued using it as if nothing happened. But I assume you have some sort of backup of these files? No?

[Samir]

Hard disk drives don't beep. The beep you hear is probably coming from the circuit-board on the inside of the housing/case/enclosure. It tells you that something is not right, it could mean a bad connection, or just about anything. I was unable to locate any documentation on WDC website about any special beep codes. What model is this? If you could provide model number that would be helpful.