Question Seagate Archive HDD Failure. No Crash, No Spin, Silent. Troubleshooting Advise…

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needspractice

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I have a Seagate Archive HDD (Seagate (STEB8000100) Expansion Desktop 8TB External Hard Drive HDD – USB 3.0 for PC Laptop). It was in an external enclosure. I have several external hard drives including a WD. I may have accidently used my WD power adapter for my Seagate Archive HDD. Nevertheless, my Seagate Archive HDD is no longer working.

I bought several of these Expansion Drives. I opened another one and it is a Seagate Barracuda instead of a Seagate Archive HDD. I was just hoping to have a Donor for parts but no luck there.

I went ahead and ordered from an online website the exact match PCB boards to see if I can get this hard drive working by myself. I am not looking forward to sending this off to a Data Recovery Service, but I am thinking about it.

If someone could help me troubleshoot this a little beforehand to see if I can get this working without having to send it off that would be greatly appreciated.

Here are my thoughts.

The drive is completely silent, there was never a horrific ending to the drive. Like it is spinning up and crashing, knocking, beeping, whatever. Just one day I plugged it in and nothing.

Now here is the odd part. It seems like something is barely connecting because in keeps connecting and discounting in windows. You hear the Windows Notification that it connects and then disconnects. Sometimes it stays connected and you can see in “Computer Management” under “Disk Management” the drive. It is like it is barely connected on a sub low level.

What will happen is that in “Disk Management” a window will pop up and say you must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it. MBR vs GPT. Of course, after doing this, I get the error “The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error”.

Disk 2, red down arrow, Unknown, Not Initialized

Most of the time the partition data or the available space does not show up in disk management, but rarely it does show up, i.e., size of partition and available space to create a disk partition. However, even when that shows up it still gives me the error “The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error”.

My thoughts are that the drive is fully functional, but I may have blown a diode or something. The hard drive was sitting in an enclosure and had an extra PCB Board that was a bridge between the power supply and the hard drive. This other PCB board on the external enclosure is working perfectly. I popped out another Hard Drive from another enclosure used it on the bridge and everything works perfectly. So, I am not sure how the Seagate Archive HDD failed even when the External PCB power supply which held it did not.

This is what leads me to be that somehow the PCB Board is no longer working on the Seagate Archive HDD and this may be a simple solution. I ordered a new PCB Donor Board and was hoping all I must do is transfer the “Bios” and install the new Donor Board and everything works.

My question is troubleshooting.

Before messing around with my vital “Bios” chip. Can I just swap out my Donor Board to just see if power is restored and the drive spins up? I know I will not be able to access the Data however, I would be able to confirm that my other original PCB board is the main culprit. Then proceed to swapping the “Bios” chip on the Donor Board.

Will swapping the PCB board without swapping the “Bios” chip cause any “Data” loss or damage the Seagate Archive HDD?

Troubleshooting Steps

-1 Order Donor PCB Board
-2 Swap Original Board with Donor Board without Swapping Bios Chip
-3 See if Seagate Archive HDD powers on whatsoever, spins, etc.
-4 If powers on and spins up, swap out Bios Chip
-5 If Bios Chip is swapped and drive is still not responsive begin consultation with “Data Recovery Service”.

Another question is do I simply just send this off to a “Data Recovery Service” I would hate to swap out my Bios chip and make it more difficult for them to recover. However, if it is a simple PCB Board Swap and Bios Swap, I would prefer to do it myself.

Please feel free to give me any other pointers. I am just trying to perform some basic troubleshooting tactics before sending this drive off for an expensive recovery. I just have a feeling that this might be as simple as a PCB Board/Bios swap because the drive was never dropped, and in perfect condition. It is not that old either.

Thanks!
 

needspractice

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Try to read a healthy donor ROM. That will prove whether you are doing everything correctly.

BTW, who was your repairer?

Here is my best donor board. I think I did it right. This board powers up the drive, stays on and continues to spin, just windows can't read the contents.

https://ufile.io/iu8n2i7q

I'm at their mercy right now. They erased my original bios and didn't copy it over correclty. I have emailed them begging them to see if the tech backed it up. They already told me once they don't back roms up.
 

needspractice

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Try to read a healthy donor ROM. That will prove whether you are doing everything correctly.

BTW, who was your repairer?

I have two rom chips that are not on pcb boards, when I attached those directly to the semi conductor and read the rom, its only 2K worth of data. Maybe this rom chip doesn't have the rest of the data.
 

needspractice

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Recap:

1-Looks like my original bios was erased.
2-Looks like my original bios was only partially copied over to the new rom.: 512K worth.
3-I have one PCB Donor Board that boots up the hard drive and keeps it running but o/s can't read the data.
4. Data Recovery Place that transferred my bios to another PCB Donor Board, said they don't back up roms and they don't have my rom to email me.

What are my options?
 

needspractice

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I do have two rom chips that are detached from PCB Board's and both of them only have around 2K worth of data that is dumped. Maybe that is all the required information on the ROM chip.

Seems like when the ROM Chips are attached to the PCB Board they have more data.

Maybe we are in good shape.
 

needspractice

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FYI

no there is not. I will tell you exactly what happened since day one.

  1. bought external hard drive
  2. transferred files to it
  3. worked for months
  4. one day plugged it in, nothing, did not spin up, no sound
  5. thought I plunged the wrong power adapter in it and fried something
  6. got on forums
  7. learned about buying a new pcb donor board and doing bios transfer myself
  8. attempted bios transfer and failed
  9. shipped off bios chip and pcb board to a place that does that
  10. they said media was too damaged to work on
  11. i talked to someone asking what else they could do? I told them I did not want full recovery of hard drive just a bios swap
  12. they said they could do this
  13. they transfered bios over and mailed me new bios on a new donor board
  14. did not ship me back original board and bios at first
  15. asked if they could ship original board and bios back
  16. they did
  17. who knows what I truly have at this point, they could still have my original bios, it could be in the trash, they could have my bios file saved
  18. we are all here at this point now
 

DSzymborski

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Honestly, there's not much to do at this point. If the data is important, the smart thing would have been to send off the drive to a professional firm from the get-go. Recovering yourself without any real experience was always going to be an extreme longshot and it's one you've already invested way too much time and money in.

Recovery from a lab now is likely to be far more expensive than it would have been a month ago, with far less chance of success. But those are your basic choices: professional firm or accept the loss of data. Either way, you've hopefully learned the value of having a proper backup solution for your data, so it's not a total loss.
 

needspractice

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Feb 6, 2013
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Honestly, there's not much to do at this point. If the data is important, the smart thing would have been to send off the drive to a professional firm from the get-go. Recovering yourself without any real experience was always going to be an extreme longshot and it's one you've already invested way too much time and money in.

Recovery from a lab now is likely to be far more expensive than it would have been a month ago, with far less chance of success. But those are your basic choices: professional firm or accept the loss of data. Either way, you've hopefully learned the value of having a proper backup solution for your data, so it's not a total loss.

Who do you recommend for a professional data recovery service? This drive is still in perfect condition and with a random pcb board spins up very nicely and stays on. I feel like a professional data recovery service could still save this data.
 

DSzymborski

Titan
Moderator
Who do you recommend for a professional data recovery service? This drive is still in perfect condition and with a random pcb board spins up very nicely and stays on. I feel like a professional data recovery service could still save this data.

I have a few friends who swear by Ace Data Recovery, but I can't speak from personal experience; I've been backup paranoid since my first computer as a kid in the mid-80s, so I've never needed to engage these kinds of services.
 

needspractice

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"Pepe" claims he can recover a drive in your situation. I've never seen a report on the outcome of a case such as yours.


Got some more donor boards in today, another one boots up the drive perfectly, stays on, however, in o/s it can't detect proper "Physical Drive Geometry". Of course because of random bios:

I just can't believe I can't get these files. Seems like the drive is right there, spinning, on, everything working... I could initilize the disk, but I heard your data is gone after that. Plus it probably wouldn't work anyway, just say i/o communication error.

https://ufile.io/ztu05s76

https://ufile.io/i6a0x3no

Also, in SeaTools it passes the Short Generic Basic Tests.