If the drive has failed there will be no way of completely erasing anything from it. One thing that you can try is placing the drive on the speaker magnets in your car. I've had several hard drives come through my shop that were scrambled because someone left the laptop in the back window of their car and the magnetic field from the speakers erased it. I will tell you that data recovery from failed drives is very expensive, WD isn't interested in the info from warrantied drives, and isn't going to pay to have each returned drive recovered. Keep in mind that WD has thousands of returned drives on an annual basis, and the chances of someone recovering anything from your drive are extremely slim. Besides, WD has a privacy policy that all warrantied drives are to be destroyed. I have WD 250, and there is no way of removing the drive without breaking the case, voiding the warranty, so I don't recommend trying to remove the drive from the case. If the drive has failed it won't matter whether the drive is in the original case or a laptop, it's still not going to work.