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How to recover data on a drive, obtain a circuit board, repair a drive, or find a list of WD data recovery partners

Answer ID 70   |    Last Updated 10/09/2014
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Data Recovery
If the drive is spinning and shows up in Disk Management (Windows), or Disk Utilities (Mac OSX), but cannot be accessed, then the drive's partition table is most likely damaged or corrupted. It may be possible to still extract the data utilizing data recovery software. Western Digital does not provide data recovery software. However, there are several kinds of Data Recovery software available. If you do a web search for Data Recovery it will yield plenty of data recovery software options.

If the drive does not show up in Disk Management (Windows), or Disk Utilities (Mac), and you have tried all the troubleshooting options relevant to your drive, then your drive has most likely failed and you will need to contact a data recovery company to retrieve your data.

Western Digital does not provide data recovery services. However, we have a list of recommended preferred data recovery partners that you can use for data recovery services.


Circuit Board
Western Digital does not sell or replace circuit boards for our hard drives nor are we aware of any other companies that sell them. Replacing the circuit board on a hard drive is not a recommended method for recovering data or drive functions as this will void the warranty on the hard drive. For every hard drive model that Western Digital manufacturers, there are many firmware changes that would make it very difficult to find a circuit board with the same firmware of the defective drive. If you attempt to install a circuit board with a different firmware than the original, this may damage the hard drive further. If you need to recover the data on your drive, please contact one of our recommended preferred data recovery partners.

Drive Repair
Western Digital does not repair or recommend repair services for our drives. Any repair services performed on a WD drive will void the warranty. If your drive is under warranty, please see Answer ID 8: How can I replace a product under warranty?.

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