HDD failure (again) ... any suggestions

I have a 1TB WD Caviar Black. Died it seems, under warranty - but WD will only swap the unit no Data recovery.
PC failure to boot up .... (OS is not on this drive) removed this HDD and PC would boot up.

Any attempts to put it back in another PC .. crashes that PC as well.

A colleague connected it to a MAC ... and it could then be scanned - one partition shows OK, but the larger E:\partition throws up h/ware failure.

Any free tools worth trying to see if I can recover any of the data ... welcome any advice.
Professional data recovery firms will be too expensive.

I have a backup, so at most only last last 3 weeks of changes.

A Mac may give problems with NTFS-formatted HDDs if not having a program installed to give that access, I don't on mine. I prefer booting to a Linux LiveDVD [Linux Mint is favored] which does give access and can work with any HDD plugged at the time of the startup.

Is that something I can do on my PC ? ....... no experience of LINUX

There are plenty of free recovery free cd which you can boot from and try and recover data

How would this work ? .... If I Put HDD in the PC .. it drags Windows to a halt .... and it won't boot up if it is there at start.

Do you mean that I boot up PC from a recovery disc that includes its own OS .. so I don't need Windows ?

If that is the case, care to advise such a program I should look at, or do I try any in that web search you linked.

Just read a review of free recovery software - 'DMDE' came out on top, but don't know if that boots up PC as you describe.

sargan said:

Do you mean that I boot up PC from a recovery disc that includes its own OS .. so I don't need Windows ? CORRECT

I would in your case boot from a linux live cd and try to save what is recoverable. Maybe you should also make some thoughts about regular backups not only from your system but your files as well. For me the method of "Grandfather, Father,Son" has worked quite well. That way I never loose my files again (been there,done that)...

Last week my data drive, 1 TB WD blue drive failed. Motor would not spin up. Put a little "freeze" on it enough to get it to boot, copied all the files to another HDD, wrote 1's to the entire disk with the WD tool. Got a replacement yesterday, and shipped the old one (9months) back to WD RMA by the USPS. The clerk at the service counter said I recognize that address, seen a lot of them lately????? Loosing my confidence in WD. :-(

meebers said:

Last week my data drive, 1 TB WD blue drive failed. Motor would not spin up. Put a little "freeze" on it enough to get it to boot, copied all the files to another HDD, wrote 1's to the entire disk with the WD tool. Got a replacement yesterday, and shipped the old one (9months) back to WD RMA by the USPS. The clerk at the service counter said I recognize that address, seen a lot of them lately????? Loosing my confidence in WD. :-(

You are starting to frighten me. even though I have 1TB and 2TB drives as well, I mostly buy the black series due to the longer warranty and cannot complain so far. the real 24/7 task I have on my purple 3TB drive which is holding up nicely... I had a 1TB drive fail within warranty (black series) and got a refurb'd blue series back. Ah well, its still working though.....

This drive first failed after only 1 month ........... it was replaced and now failed again.
I have some HDD are close on 20 years old .......... but much lower capacity - as storage capacity increased they seem to be less reliable.