To make this a short story, I am going to quickly list what happened.

Was using eraser 5.7 to delete temporary Internet files. Noticed it was taking a very long time. Decided to plug in bootable USB drive to delete the files from BartPE. Tried to abort eraser, then quickly tried to restart so I could boot from USB. However, everything was going slow. Because I was late for work, I just held in the laptop power button.

That was my fatal mistake. BartPE did not boot as quickly as normal and the hdd led was steady on.

Tried to access the drive at work using an external USB adapter but win7 showed the drive as Local Disk with no partition. Laptop does not boot from the drive.

Tried accessing the drive in a desktop with the same behavior. Windows 7 even ran chkdsk which even displayed the drive partition label, it made some corrections but still the partition was not found.

Even tried knoppix on boot USB and testdisk, however testdisk shows read error for all sectors.

At this point, what are some of my options available to me at home?

I can add more detail if it would be helpful.

Sent from a mobile web browser.

if ur drive is spinning normal then i suspect in Translator, if you read here on this forum more details
always bad move unplugging USB while its processing specially Seagate damn seagate

_________________
Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

Yes drive spins up normally at boot, laptop and desktop BIOS see the drive.

My problem was hard resetting the laptop while it was still reading/writing.

I will search for Seagate and translator when I have more time.

I cannot find information about Seagate translator on here or in searching google.

The computer BIOS will recognize the hard drive but starting any boot utilities takes a very long time, many utilities report LBA read errors for the whole drive.

Bit more information, MHDD marks all of the drive with UNCR errors. One block shows >500ms.

Looking at the MHDD faq, this symptom could indicate head crash, PCB damage or a firmware problem.

I tried swapping the PCB for a new drive where the date code was +1 from the damaged drive. The drive was not recognized by the BIOS.

Is there anything left which I can try from home to make an attempt at data recovery?

Thanks!

Posting again, I am looking to pickup a older Seagate notebook hard drive so I can test the RS232 adapter on the jumper pins before trying on my damaged drive.

And the problem again, MHDD says the all LBA blocks have UNCR errors. I halted the test before the full drive was tested.

Searching all I find for Seagate Translation is this post seagate-7200-transaltion-problem-t19061.html but no information.

What else can be done after MHDD reports every LBA has UNCR errors. I tried a PCB swap but the drive did not spin up with the new PCB.

No DIY...

Not much of an expert, but if the drive spins up okay, (without clicking) then the drive PCB board and the mechanics inside the drive are probably okay to some extent, you could try the drive in another PC to make sure your laptop is not at fault, otherwise, the drive Identification record or the boot record on the disk itself could have been corrupted.

Another idea is to try and use the drive as a slave on a pc and see if you can copy data off it. I would be careful changing PCB boards just in case you blow something.

Any system I plug the drive into and attempt to read sectors returns read errors. I plan to build the cable to read the terminal output of the drive, hopefully I will learn more.

This is a SATA drive, there is no master/slave designation. Laptop is working perfect using the old hard drive. Best case I have head damage and the platter is intact, worse case I've got a head crash and the platter might have physical damage.

If I can build an environment to clean room specifications, I can open the drive and hopefully do a platter swap. Yes I intend to practice on a donor drive.

Good luck...

I think this item will work for terminal access to the drive's firmware:
http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-RS232-TTL-232-C ... 2311d02835

Please let me know.

Just a moment : with it you DON'T access firmware, just... uh..."talk" to the drive (hope it will LISTEN !) . It takes a lot more...

On on Earth would you want to do that?

There aren't DVD's inside you can just shove in a new case.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Why swap the platter(s)? Because I would like to make an effort to learn the skills needed for data recovery.

So the USB to rs-232 TTL adapter will work to talk to the Seagate firmware?

I give up...

You want to learn skills by starting with platter swap?!?!

You're on the complete opposed.

_________________
http://www.pclab.com.pt facebook.com/PCLAB.A.T
ACELab partner

Oh my no. First is building the RS-232/TTL cable to see what the firmware on the drive says. If the ebay item USB rs-232/ttl hardware will work, I am going to buy that next week. It will be weeks before I am ready to try anything beyond software diagnostics with this drive.

Have you already saw this: newbie-info-from-and-for-newbies-about-firmware-etc-t6562.html

_________________
http://www.pclab.com.pt facebook.com/PCLAB.A.T
ACELab partner

Don't forget that even a single letter can make your drive FUBAR in a flash