Pepe
My apologise for not replying to your PM and I thank you sincerely for your offer, however the data isn't life critical and during an intermittent operation of the drive I'd managed to backup the critical data.
I'm the learning type and would have liked to have carried out the procedure myself, so maybe I can now start investigating this procedure
BGman
As an Electronics Eng and one with SMT capability, (after the PCB swap) I naturally cleaned all suspicious HDA contacts including the PCB, reflowed the majority of devices and checked for functionality immediately after. Drive still wasn't recognised in the BIOS
Following this, I simply sat the drive down for 4 days, not powered. Last Sunday I re-checked and it magically appeared in the BIOS, but I couldn't extract the data as it was the only drive connected.
I switched the PC off, connected a second HDD (running W2K), rebooted - BIOS showed scrambled data.
I flipped the HDD over by 180deg and voila, BIOS recognised HDD. Then I preceded to copy the rest of the data off without failure - several hours worth.
STRANGE eh?
Quote:
but there might have been failing sectors in the SA that finally could be read in and so on.
So it is not so easy to tell the source of the problem.
Several instances of position change (of one particular drive) caused it to randomly function so I suspect this is the answer.
Where can I learn about the HDD parameters: SA, Maintenance Area, Firmware, NVRAM - ATA specs?