Windows 7 WD Caviar disk very slow to respond

alberto

New Member
Hello, I am currently experiencing a troubling issue with a WD Caviar HD.
It was installed as the only HD on a Dell machine that after falling on the desk (from vertical to flat) decided it was tired of booting normally.
I took out the hard drive, attached it via SATA to a working Win 7 Pro machine. If I leave the SATA cable connected the system won't boot, I assume it is confused which HD to boot from, but if I boot into my Win 7 Pro from the working HD and then connect the SATA cable, the system becomes very slow to respond. I wanted to see if any data could be recovered, so I checked if the system could see the HD and it turns out sometimes it can and sometimes it can't. Also when I force various programs and utilities to update the list of mounted disks the system becomes VERY slow. As an example I am currently trying to run EaseUS Partition Manager, it has been updating system information for over a half hour and counting...
Any ideas? The drive does not make any clicking noises and it seems to spin up correctly.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
The symptoms you mention are common with read/write issues. I've seen these symptoms many times over the years. The electronics within the drive may have been damaged during the shock of the case falling over on the desk.

All of the following can slow a PC to a crawl while trying to read and write.
1) Diskette read/write issues
2) HDD read/write issues
3) CD/DVD read/write issues
4) USB stick read/write issues

It's very irritating (for me that is) to place a CD/DVD (that has no visual damage) in a drive and loose all PC functionality, until the effort of reading the disk finally times out a minute later. Anytime a PC faces read/write issues, the PC will continue trying to read/write until it completes the task or times out. This is more of an issue with mechanical drives than solid state devices. Mechanics within a device often causes these issues when the device starts showing wear from usage.
 
Hi, clifford, sounds pretty bad... I'm afraid to ask but: do you know of any way to read data off the disk? Without resorting to expensive data-recovery companies? The data on the drive itself was mostly backed up, the friend who owns the PC will be losing some photos but that's it, so no point in investing a lot of money.
Thanks!
 
Well, as I said the data wasn't really that important. Thanks for the help though cliffordcooley! At least I learned something! ;)
 
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