Hard Drive Recovery Tricks

If the circuit board has failed, replacing it with a board from the EXACT model of drive will allow you to operate the drive long enough to copy the data from it. As a rule, if the model is not exact, then the circuit board and sealed mechanical drive unit will not play at all together.

If the mechanical part of the drive has failed, the only real option is clean room data recovery. In a clean room operation, the drive is opened up and tweaked a bit to get it spinning right again. If the drive is opened up in a non-clean room environment, the normal airborne microscopic dust particles will mess up the drive surface forever.

The buzzing noise may indicate that the mechanical part of the drive is unable to complete its initial diagnostic, head synchronization and startup operations. So the drive simply tries again, and again... Ben Myers