Highlight of some common failure modes of Western Digital 3.5 desktop hard disk drives

Common Western Digital hard disk failures

Western digital hard disks suffer mainly from firmware corruption, read write head failure and development of bad sectors.

In the case of firmware corruption, BIOS usually has problems detecting the drive or garbage characters may be detected. In a good number of cases, even if the model is detected by the PC system BIOS correctly, the disk will not go to ready state due to corruption of some primary G-list or P-list firmware tracks. Without repairing the damaged code, recovery is normally not possible through other means.

Head crash is typically detected by clicking sound emitted from the disk. Generally, the failure is also accompanied by firmware corruption.

Development of bad sectors could happen without prior warning and deteriorate rapidly. After some time, the disk will refuse to boot up and hang in the middle of the booting process.

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