data recovery - Diagnose sound of damaged hard drive

I'm trying to recover some data form a 3TB Western Digital drive (WD30EZRX) that was part of a MyBook USB 3 enclosure. I'm pretty new to data recovery, and I'm having trouble diagnosing the precise issue.

I believe it is damaged hardware based on:

• The drive emits the same strange sound when connected via SATA or its USB enclosure (see video: https://youtu.be/DsOaV9svMK4)



• My BIOS can read the model number from the drive, but it reports the size as 0 bytes and does not show any other information (Serial Number, etc.)


• Ubuntu dmesg reports errors when attempting to spin up the drive


• The disk is not discoverable by testdisk


• In Windows Disk Management, the drive shows as Not Initialized. Of course, I haven't attempted to initialize it because from what I have read, that will cause the data to be lost.

Basically, I'm wondering if someone with a little experience can watch the linked video and give me any insights into that sound. I'm trying to determine if it's likely a PCB failure or something more serious.

Update

I worked on the drive a bit more. SpeedFan did not recognize the drive, so I was not able to use it to read SMART data (smartctl also failed to read any SMART data from the drive).

When I connected the drive via the USB enclosure, this is the dmesg output:

[ 3254.012111] usb 1-7: new high-speed USB device number 14 using xhci_hcd
[ 3254.140508] usb 1-7: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=1140
[ 3254.140513] usb 1-7: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=5
[ 3254.140516] usb 1-7: Product: My Book 1140
[ 3254.140519] usb 1-7: Manufacturer: Western Digital
[ 3254.141227] usb-storage 1-7:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected

[ 3254.141380] scsi host16: usb-storage 1-7:1.0
[ 3255.139027] scsi 16:0:0:0: Direct-Access     WD       My Book 1140     1019 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[ 3255.139198] scsi 16:0:0:1: Enclosure         WD       SES Device       1019 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[ 3255.140362] sd 16:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg11 type 0
[ 3255.140498] ses 16:0:0:1: Attached Enclosure device
[ 3255.140595] ses 16:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg12 type 13
[ 3255.141301] ses 16:0:0:1: Failed to get diagnostic page 0x8000002
[ 3255.141305] ses 16:0:0:1: Failed to bind enclosure -19
[ 3255.141615] sd 16:0:0:0: [sdk] Unit Not Ready
[ 3255.141622] sd 16:0:0:0: [sdk] Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] 

[ 3255.141627] sd 16:0:0:0: [sdk] Add. Sense: Internal target failure

I tried running lshw -C Disk as suggested. It took a very long time, but eventually returned this:

*-disk UNCLAIMED
       description: SCSI Disk
       product: My Book 1140
       vendor: WD
       physical id: 0.0.0

       bus info: scsi@16:0.0.0
       version: 1019
       configuration: ansiversion=6

The only thought I've had is that Western Digital has this proprietary SES driver which they describe as an alternative way to communicate with the drive. I was thinking it could possibly be used to recover data, but I have no idea how it would work. The drive does show up as an SES device in Windows Device manager.

Beyond that, I'm pretty much out of ideas. I guess it's time to get some data recovery estimates. Thanks to all who helped.

Answer

I'm pretty sure that sound is the drive resetting over and over while trying to initialize, because the drive is damaged.

So the drive is never finishing initializing properly, and therefore never goes into a mode that it can be read fully (firmware or data).

Additionally, the fact you can't get SMART data from it leads me to think the circuitry on the drive is malfunctioning.

If the BIOS can't recognize the size of the drive then most likely no data recovery software is going to be able to work.

Replacing the PCB on the drive with another from another (working) drive of the EXACT same make, model and revision may make it so the drive can be initialized, etc., but that rarely works in my experience.

If you really need the data, stop messing with it and send it off to a professional data recovery firm (the more you play with it, the more likely your data will be damaged further).

Good luck!