hard drive very slow not always showing up

[physicsdoc]

i am having a strange problem with my secondary hdd. It is a Seagate 7200.12. It has started being very slow. Some programs that use files on the drive have had mysterious lag. Today it was very bad so I restarted the computer and the drive was not recognized. Not only that but the drive was slowing the boot up of the windows drive.

I eventually booted the computer without the drive and connected it with a USB sata connector. Now it shows up only after being connected for 10 minutes. It will eventually list the files but I've only been able to get a few Mb off it before it disappears again.

It is tantalizingly close to working. I just want to get some of the files off it before I put it out of its misery.

I read in another forum that sometimes it is possible to swap the PCB with another identical drive, I tried this but the drive appeared as an unformatted 4GB partition rather than a formatted 1TB drive full of info.

Any suggestions/thoughts?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, physicsdoc.

You could try accessing the drive via Ubuntu Live USB/DVD, to see if it stays recognized for a bit longer so that you can get your data off of it. Basically you should've done that as soon as you've found out that your drive's having issues.
There's a great chance that your drive won't work if you change the PCB, even if it is identical to your drive's PCB, as it apparently happened in your case. If you're unable to recover your data with the original PCB and data recovery software or Ubuntu, then I guess your only option is a data recovery company.

Hope that helps. Good luck!
Boogieman_WD