Update:
Well, turns out that hard drive is in fact dead. It may even have even burnt up one of the components under the PCB because a bit of it looks a bit brownish.
Luckilly, that hard drive, a 200 gig Western Digital, used to be half of a pair that were in a RAID setup, and the other drive was also in use in my PC.
If I'm not mistaken, drives generally need to be identical to be put in RAID setups. More importantly, the two drives look identical board wise, and all the numbers on them match up... except for one number which is stamped into the metal of the drive which is slightly different.
So... the current plan is to copy all the data off the good drive, and then swap the board in it with the bad one, and see if that lets me pull the data off the bad drive. I found this nifty program for doing that called TeraCopy. It copies files much faster than explorer and skips those which fail. At least that's the idea. I don't know how long it's supposed to wait to skip a file, but it skipped a bunch while I was out, and then it got stuck on one while I was watching it, and trying to skip it manually caused the program to lock up. But luckilly it has a skip all duplicates feature so it won't have to recopy all that stuff it was copying for an hour when I get it restarted here in a few moments.
Btw, one interesting thing to note is that when I plugged in the bad drive, it went click click as usual, but when I got into Windows, it detected new hardware and said the new hardware was WDC ROM MODEL HAWK with 8gb of storage space. Kinda weird, but seems other people have seen that same thing when their Western Digital drives fail. Nobody seems to know what it really means though, ie, whether it means the disk failed physically or on the hardware side.
But my guess is that it's not meant to help diagnose the problem at all, but what it's really telling me is that it is in fact, a hardware failure rather than the platters being scratched. And that bodes well for my plan to switch out the board to get the data back.
Well, turns out that hard drive is in fact dead. It may even have even burnt up one of the components under the PCB because a bit of it looks a bit brownish.
Luckilly, that hard drive, a 200 gig Western Digital, used to be half of a pair that were in a RAID setup, and the other drive was also in use in my PC.
If I'm not mistaken, drives generally need to be identical to be put in RAID setups. More importantly, the two drives look identical board wise, and all the numbers on them match up... except for one number which is stamped into the metal of the drive which is slightly different.
So... the current plan is to copy all the data off the good drive, and then swap the board in it with the bad one, and see if that lets me pull the data off the bad drive. I found this nifty program for doing that called TeraCopy. It copies files much faster than explorer and skips those which fail. At least that's the idea. I don't know how long it's supposed to wait to skip a file, but it skipped a bunch while I was out, and then it got stuck on one while I was watching it, and trying to skip it manually caused the program to lock up. But luckilly it has a skip all duplicates feature so it won't have to recopy all that stuff it was copying for an hour when I get it restarted here in a few moments.
Btw, one interesting thing to note is that when I plugged in the bad drive, it went click click as usual, but when I got into Windows, it detected new hardware and said the new hardware was WDC ROM MODEL HAWK with 8gb of storage space. Kinda weird, but seems other people have seen that same thing when their Western Digital drives fail. Nobody seems to know what it really means though, ie, whether it means the disk failed physically or on the hardware side.
But my guess is that it's not meant to help diagnose the problem at all, but what it's really telling me is that it is in fact, a hardware failure rather than the platters being scratched. And that bodes well for my plan to switch out the board to get the data back.