This came from a pack of three drives I bought today in a lot of computer parts.

The first two drives are a 3.2GB IDE Maxtor and a 80GB WD800JB-00FMA0, nothing interesting as they both work (although the Windows installs on them are broken but that's another story.)

Then there's this Seagate drive.

Now, I am totally going to expect some replies such as "dump it" , but since it was cheap I figured I might try and see what is up with it as well until I can find a Nokia CA-42/DKU-5 cable (it's painfully hard to find one here) to fix my other Seagate (the ST2000DM001).

On first glance, the two components marked in the picture (that I assume they were a inductor and a ceramic cap) were missing. Thankfully, I had a old dead ST310211A from which I could steal the components (although I couldn't find a 100 inductor, only a 4R7 one) and several minutes later I had the drive spin up (without any bangs like I had with 2 previous drives that were in so bad shape I just chuckled them in the bin as nothing on their PCBs was salvageable) and get recognized in BIOS.

Now, here's what the strange behaviour of the drive is:


AMI BIOS - the drive will successfully identify itself, show "UDMA 5, SMART Capable and Status Ok" but then just hangs at that. (with an ASRock board I had the code 0078 in the lower right corner)

Award BIOS - the drive successfully identifes and finishes POST, but then it VERY SLOWLY boots into the Windows 7 Error Menu (the one with Launch Startup Repair) and will very slowly load the Startup Repair environment.

Any ideas what is the reason that it loads up so slow? I was thinking it was the 4R7 inductor that might have been the issue but I'm not sure.

Can you retrieve a SMART report with CrystalDiskInfo?
https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

What voltage do you measure across the capacitors to the left of the inductor? Do you see -5V?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

The terminal output will be revealing a lot of information.
Either way, it sounds like the drive has bad sectors.
Would recommend learning to work with MHDD on old/older drives. Then can rule out if it is an issue with the drive itself OR operating system (Windows) related.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Well, I guess I can close this case - drive failed just as I was trying to boot in to UBCD to run MHDD

Lesson learned I guess, Seagate are absolute hit and miss.