Seagate HDD apparent mechanical failure. Need guidance

[TheDPC]

I've recently (as in two days ago) experienced what appears to be a major mechanical failure of my Seagate HDD storage drive. I should say its finally the final nail in the drives coffin. For probably about a month the drive would at times make the "disconnect hardware" noise in windows and disappear from the device manager. I thought it might have been a loose SATA connection, so I would just reconnect, restart the computer, and go about my business. Two days ago the drive started to cause the computer to not even get past "starting windows" splash screen until I disconnected the drive and tried without it. I removed the drive from the desktop rig and placed it in an external case so I could turn it on and off easily to try and see what was happening. The drive makes a noise, I wouldn't exactly say its a clicking but it will make what sounds like a high pitched beep (if requested I can film/record and attach in a following correspondence). I checked to see if the head was stuck to the platter and it wasn't, it was in the parked position. As far as I can tell the drive does spin up. When I power the drive in the case, the computer makes the "device found" noise, but then nothing, until the drive itself makes the beep noise, and I turn off the power to the external case. Once I turn off power to the drive, I get the hardware disconnected noise from windows, and a message prompt saying the drive needs to be formatted before it can be used, which seems odd to me.

Now, that rambling aside, I'm wondering if getting the replacement PC board from a site such as onepcbsolution.com has any chance at fixing this, just long enough for me to recover data and get a non-Seagate drive, because I've seen nothing but bad things about Seagate while trying to fix this problem. Barring that, any advice, tips, or help as to what I can do would be greatly appreciated. The data on the drive isnt worth upwards of 700-800 dollars or more for professional data recovery, but it is still data that I would like to regain access to and keep.

Thanks in advance

 

[i7Baby]

Tring to repair a hard drive is a waste of time. You need to get specialists to do it. And it's only worthwhile if you've got extremely valuable data you want to recover.

Consider the alternative - buy a new 2TB 7200 rpm, 64MB cache hdd - Seagate or WD - for less than $100

 

[TheDPC]

Yea, I get that its not worthwhile to get it professionally recovered unless the data is extremely valuable, I'm not planning on going that route at all. And yes, I plan on getting a new 2TB WD drive. I was just wondering if, given the stated symptoms/occurence, the 50$ replacement PC board had any chance of salvaging what I stand to lose.

 

[i7Baby]

Most drive problems are mechanical failures, not pcb problems. So I'd say the $50 would have much less than 50% chance of repairing a $100 drive.

but do a checkdisk on it then download and run Seatools to check it. Who knows? It just might be isolated bad sectors.

 

[reedo_43]

I have to strongly disagree! I have recovered at least 6 drives by buying donor pcb's Before sata it was much easier, make sure to match as many numbers as possible. Good luck...definitely worth a shot.

http://www.donordrives.com/

 

[fzabkar]

If the drive spins up, or attempts to spin up, then it is highly unlikely to be a PCB fault.

You could obtain a diagnostic report via the drive's serial terminal interface. That will tell us more about the problem. Just don't issue any commands to the serial port.

 

[TheDPC]

Ok so I downloaded SeaTools, powered on the drive and as usual it made its clicks and the beep. The same thing happened with the "hardware connected" sound, but no response. I refreshed the scan of available drives while in SeaTools, but it wouldn't complete. It would just hang on detecting and wouldn't advance past to the interface until I cut the power to the drive. At that point Windows again made the "hardware disconnect" sound, and again posted the "you must format this drive" message. I'm not going to pretend I know everything, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that this seems to be more than just bad sectors? My options at fixing this are slowly ticking away, and I appreciate the help. Any other ideas?

 

[TheDPC]

If the drive spins up, or attempts to spin up, then it is highly unlikely to be a PCB fault.

You could obtain a diagnostic report via the drive's serial terminal interface. That will tell us more about the problem. Just don't issue any commands to the serial port.

How would I go about obtaining this diagnostic report?

 

[fzabkar]

There are numerous tutorials on the subject of the Seagate 7200.11 BSY bug. Follow the instructions for hooking up a USB-TTL adapter, but don't issue any commands other than Ctrl-Z. Certain commands are data destructive for your model.

Good places to visit are the HDD Oracle and HDD Guru forums.