Alberghettio

This is a little long, sorry, but I really need help.

I have a 250GB WD Caviar drive that is about 4 years old or so, it has always been in an external enclosure. I use it strictly for storing video, that is until about a week ago. I was going to reinstall my operating system so I moved EVERYTHING every pic i have ever taken, every document I have ever saved, and abou 40GB of music. I realize that not moving them back right away wasnt very bright but what can you do? Long story short I packed it very carefully and got on a plane. When I took it out and plugged it in tonight the enclosure light turns blue (like it is supposed to) the harddrive starts "whirring" then it clicks, the enclosure light turns red and then it starts the whole process over again. I really need the things on this harddrive!!

I am pretty confident that it is not the enclosure as i took the drive out of it and just plugged the power back in which allowed me to actually hold the drive in my hand and make sure the click was coming from the drive, and if i take the drive out entirely the enclosure starts up and the light stays blue with no clicking.

So---I could recover the data, if i could get the drive to actually start.

Does anyone know if switching to a ide/usb adapter cord or even putting it into a computer would help???

Or what the actual problem might be?

Or if i can switch out the logic board???

PLEASE ANY INPUT WOULD HELP

thanks so much for your time;

raptor_pa

OK first thing is forget the USB connection for trouble shooting, USB protocols don't support the ATA command set for low level access. First thing to do is get the disk out of the enclosure and connected to a desktop as an internal drive, let it talk to the PC the way it was built to without the USb translation. From what you described however, it sounds more like a physical or firmware failure so I would be surprised if it starts internally, but if it does, be prepared to copy files IMMEDIATELY, it may not start again.
Actual problems could be a couple of failure points. The drive cannot read the data from the service area of the disk that it needs to start. Drives have their own processor, and basically go through their own boot sequence before they are ready to deliver data to the PC. When you have the disk out of the enclosure, post the full model number - that will give some ideas about which failure point is most likely. Could be a head failure, preamp failure, the SA area of the platters may be damaged.
The model number will also tell us a bit about the likely success of a PCB swap. In the lab, if I have an acceptable donor board I often try it before going to more extreme physical recoveries, it does require a very precise match in the donor board, and even then could require moving chip u12 from the patient board to the donor board, since some drives store some of the drive specific adaptive info to NVRam.
If the the drive still clicks and doesn't init mounted internally in a desktop, then the parameters you need to match to find a potential donor board are
Model number
5th and 6th characters of the DCM code
The date should be close
Firmware rev
Country of origin

If the chipset is Marvell ( stamped on the chips ) then the adaptives are burned to ROM and require reprogramming with special hardware.

Based on experience with WD, firmware issues which teh baord swap could fix are generally the least likely, but it is worth a try. Beyond that - the drive will need to go to a clean room for a technician to disassemble and rebuild.