1TB Segate HDD Problem

[olafkr]

Hi,
I had lots of problems with my storage hard drive last time. It's 1TB Segate Barracuda HDD. I own it for about five years now.A month ago i was copying GTA V files to another directory. I left it overnight, and when I woke up i saw the speed decreased drastically. I thought that may be some bug or error, so i restarted the computer. Then it become extremely slow. The bootup process took about 8 minutes ( i have my os installed at ssd).But after it booted up, the drive wasn't showing up.
It can be seen in Windows drive manager, but i couldn't mount it. There was some permission error.
So i went ahead and checked for solutions. After a bit of googling i decided to replace the hdd's PCB. I ordered one from ebay and waited. Yesterday the PCB showed up in mail, so i replaced it. Of course including bios swap. It started to work again and i could see it in windows explorer but still, everything was extremely slow when the drive was plugged in. But anyway, i started to backup my files. Then i saw the speed is as low as it was when i was copying these GTA files overnight, and even after short while, the speed decreased to 0B/s. What i discovered is when i grabbed my pen and punched the drive, it started to gain speed and quickly decrease. At this moment the drive was still spining. Today i opened the hdd to check is the head stuck, and blow on it. The head was parked where it should be and there wasn't any dust on it. I also unscrewed the pcb and cleaned contacts with isopropyl alcohol and rubbed them with knife to bare copper for better contact. Now the drive won't spin up at all.
Is there any chance to save this drive and copy few files from it?
All of my drives are bitlocker secured, including this hdd, if this makes a diffrence.


English is not my native language.

 

[RememberThe5th]

You basicly ruined the hdd by opening. Every hdd has filters for air as i personally opened ones with bad sectors for magnet and other diy stuff.
Now you cannot save data.

 

[olafkr]

How did i ruined hdd by just opening it? None of the dust has gotten onto the platters, and i think, you can't break the hdd's motor by just lifting the lid?

 

[RememberThe5th]

The hdd is not designed to be opened, after you screw back, every screw has its own torque that has to be screwed back, its same as dissasembling engine of a car, and blowing into you have slight moisture into it.

Also swapping PCB needs to be exact model exact bios/firmware of hdd's model. Its not same as swapping cpu, gpu.

Everyone will tell you that you basicly by opening hdd you ruined it.

 

[seagate_surfer]

olafkr, understand the drive is old and most likely out of warranty so what you did was an attempt on your part to save the drive and its data. Now, doing all this to the drive just made the option of data recovery impossible or extremely expensive. Would take this situation and make it a learning opportunity on the importance of backups. All drives will fail eventually so having a good backup plan is essential.

The conventional wisdom by tech experts on backups is known as the 3-2-1 method.

Basically you want:

3 copies of any data you don't want to lose.
2 different mediums it's stored on (so 2 different drives in your computer, for example)
1 copy kept offsite, to prevent against disaster.

Best of luck.