Hi!

I've got a Seagate ST2000DL003 (2TB disk) thats been running in a RAID-1 for some years. Suddenly it stopped, resulting in a crashed RAID with lots of lost data. Strange as the other disk in the RAID is fully operational. I'm not really sure if the broken disk is the only reason to why the RAID crashed but I'll retire that RAID anyway and most of the data was backed up soo I dont really care about that. However I'm more interested in the broken disk. There might be some data to recover and when troubleshooting I noticed something odd that catched my interest.

This drive reports itself to be a ST_M13FQBL with a serial number of QNR_BFW and thats not the case. When googling on this I found several pages mentioning that it might be possible to unbrick the disk as its likely the firmware that is affected and not the actual data. I found some threads that described a procedure to recover but they were all related to older disks and parts of the instructions are missing due to broken links.

So now I'm curious about if someone can a) confirm that it might be possible to recover the disk with these procedures and b) describe or point to an updated and complete description on how to do it.

This thread talks about the same situation on other model of disk http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=11403&start=

Regards
Hans

Those symptoms mean that the drive cannot read anything from the SA (Service area) and so cannot initialise.

Almost certainly this means bad heads, and probable media damage, so definitely not a DIY job.

I'm suspecting the drive also spins down?

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No, I dont think so. Bios makes a few tries during boot but gives up. I think the disk is spinning nice and quietly. Currently its laying on my desk so thats all from what I can remember, didnt play much with it to avoid getting things worse.