Data Recovery: Western Digital Protege hard disk errors

Data Recovery on Western Digital Protege hard disk drives

WD Protege series model numbers: WD1600AB, WD1200AB, WD800AB, WD600AB, WD800EB, WD600EB, WD400EB, WD200EB

Often the failure symptoms of the Western Digital Protege hard disk are very similar to those of the Western Digital Caviar family.

Additional Symptoms: A Protege drive will in some cases be working perfectly, and then appear to suddenly fail. This behaviour is most often noticed during a reboot, after which the drive will, in most cases, still be recognised by the BIOS (although in severe cases the drive will not be seen). You may see an error message telling you of a ‘DISK BOOT FAILURE’, ‘PRIMARY MASTER HARD DISK FAILURE’, or that your ‘OPERATING SYSTEM CANNOT BE FOUND’.

Audio: Listen to a noisy Western Digital hard disk with severe initialisation problems (.wav file, 34k). The data from these drives is often recoverable - this audio file comes from a faulty Western Digital WD400EB hard disk and is a typical failure symptom you may encounter.

Cause: Like all hard disks, these drives are susceptible to component failure. Additionally, failure on these drives is sometimes caused by a corruption of the firmware zone contained on the hard disk itself. This failure causes the hard disk to ‘forget’ where the data storage area of the disk starts, thus the read/write heads cannot find the correct initilisation signal from the platter. This causes the drive to fail.

Recovery possibilities: Data Clinic are often able to perform a full data recovery on these Western Digital Caviar drives with the above symptoms.

What if I have one of these drives but the symptoms are different?: This is quite possible. These drives are still prone to all the other problems hard disks suffer from ie. mechnical failure, logical failure, bad sectors etc.

What should I do?: Call the Data Clinic and talk your problem through with us on 0871 977 2525, or fill out our auto-form and we'll call you back

Further information:

• Faults and problems on non noisy Western Digital Caviar hard disk drives
• Faults and problems on noisy Western Digital Caviar hard disk drives
• Faults and failure symptoms on early Western Digital Caviar hard disk drives
• Back to our main Western Digital problem specific page
• Western Digital's WD Caviar 'EIDE' data sheet (PDF)
• Western Digital's WD Caviar 'SE' data sheet (PDF)

> Back to the MAIN data recovery page

Please note that all modern hard disk drives are manufactured to very high standards, fail infrequently and have very similar rates of reliability.

Above: A Western Digital WD200EB hard disk. Manufactured in large quantities, the EB series are 5400RPM, 2Mb buffer hard disks.