Hard drive gone ?

Hi.

I think my hard drive has died but just want to see what others think.

I bought the same hard drive from ebay with a new board,as the one on the other drive did not work but even with new board on, it just seems to keep clicking.

Please see video with it open and tell me what you think?


Video here.

Video will be removed in a few days.

Thanks.

Didn't look at the video but have you checked that the board revisions are the same? There may have been a firmware change.

Hi John, yes it's the same board and model.
Video is so you can see what the HD is doing. Better than trying to explain in words.

I'm afraid I disable lots of content, mainly for security reasons.

If the data is important you will need professional help.

Ok thanks anyway.
Other members can take a look at the video and let me know.

It's on photobucket btw.

Is it a Seagate 500GB or 1TB drive by any chance?

They had a buggy firmware that affected large numbers of drives that results in after a certain number of drive spin ups the drive will not initialise correctly. The data is unaffected on the disk, but it becomes impossible to access as the drive permanently returns a "BSY" (busy) signal to the BIOS.

There is a hugely long discussion and detailed explanation of it over on MSFN http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-...

It is fixable - at least temporarily to be able to retrieve your data. That thread has details on how to go about the fix - be warned it is not straight-forward!

This should give you some idea of what is involved
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg-yVfD55tY

And no, you can't just swap the control board to fix it as the value that causes the problem is actually stored in the service sector on the drive itself.

However, from your video, you've popped your drive open.... very bad idea! Even dust on the platter will knacker it.

Look here for an idea of the closeness of the head to the platter compared to a dust particle and a hair:
http://staging.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/o...


How I know? I had one of the affected drives and had to do this "repair" to retrieve my data.

Best of luck if it does turn out to be this issue - it took me a long time and a lot of patience!

Edited by deleted (Fri 16-Sep-11 01:03:30)

I think its knackered, but guess you know that already.

HD is a western digital and about 100GB.


I had to open the HD to see what is wrong with it but do see what you are saying. Lid has been put back on so, should be clean.

What about swapping the disks out into another drive that is the same?


Edit, sorry that were ment to be a reply to GeeTee.

Edited by deleted (Fri 16-Sep-11 13:03:54)

Technically possible I suppose. Very unlikely to survive the transfer without a proper clean environment though.

It really depends what the problem actually is. If it is an issue with corrupt or unfeasible data in the service sector of the drive throwing the board out, then the problem will just follow the platters.

You could try posting up on MSFN with your exact model number and symptoms - there's a few people on there who do data recovery for a living and really know their stuff on this subject.

Sorry I can't be of more help, but my only knowledge is from recovering my own drive - which was a very specific problem to that particular drive.

Best of luck

Ah, OK you've probably voided the warranty :-/

Even if it weren't toast already opening a hard drive will usually kill modern ones - atmostpheric dust will knacker the heads & platters. That's why disk recovery companies have "space grade" clean rooms to open the things up in.

Get the data from back-up copies and throw the drive. If you don't have backups and the data is important then send it to a professional disk recovery service but don't expect recovery to be cheap.