7200.12
ST500DM002
FW: KC45

Drive spins up normally and makes normal noises only, but is never detected in BIOS of multiple systems. Drive never spins down.

After shorting the read channels a million times, I finally got the timing right and gained terminal access.

My problem now is that I don't know what to do now that I have the F3 T> prompt.

What type of non destructive commands can I run to attempt to diagnose to problem?

I would like the data from this drive but it is not precious enough to pay big money to get it back. Plus I would like the learning experience.

Well, I ran "N1" to clear SMART and it seems to have fixed it. Windows sees it again. What happened?

Bad sector in the SMART data area, or the drive corrupted the SMART results preventing the drive to work, usually a power outage when the drive was updating smart data. Doing a N1 cleared the smart and reset it to working order. better copy all important files of the drive now in case something happens again, or there could be a weak head.

Thanks for the explanation. I did have a few read errors but I got a 99% clone of it.

It would be really nice to get a 100% clone from it since it was an OS disk.

I am attempting to CHKDSK the original disk but it is reporting "insufficient disk space to fix volume bitmap."

Disk size reports correctly in BIOS and Windows, and it's only half full. Performance seems normal too.

Is there some sort of left over damage that can be corrected?

It looks like your disk might have bad sectors in the main system area of the disk that will need to be formatted using the terminal. Nothing much now that can be done but to migrate all you data to another new disk. hopefully a 99% recovery might have copied the operating system too, so its worth a go.

repairing the old disk might be troublesome and a reformat of the system area in terminal will destroy all data on disk, but it should fix bad sectors if no new ones have appeared. But its best to use a new disk anyway.

SShane