Hello everyone,
Cutting to the chase and skipping the what and how, I have an ST3000DM001 with the flash chip (M25P40) broken. No pin stubs, nothing on two of its pins. Already tried some eeprom service specialists to tinker with it without luck. Can anyone here still help in recovering the data? Is it possible? Got a response from a data recovery specialist (company will not be named), who told me they needed the chip to recover the data on this drive. I understand there's calibration data there and other stuff, but it was strange to me that not even opening the drive was suggested. The drive is mine, not doing this for anyone else. I already gathered a lot of great info on this forum while being a guest, will appreciate your input.

**I'd like to thank fzabkar for his awesome posts, served me well. Also the guys at hdd-parts.com (fzabkar referenced them in a post I believe), they transplanted the above referenced chip on a pcb for a similar hard drive and I was able to rescue my data. If you are definitely sure electronics is your problem, let them do the transplant and get a pcb from them, they're awesome.

yeah or donordrives or effectiveelectronic or accesscomputer or other 5 or 6 places

It is possible but it is going to be big bucks - less expensive if the original chip, albeit broken, is still "alive" - so it is a dead end, I'm afraid.

You have any idea of what would the process be? Taking the platters out for reading, doing new calibration on the drive with new electronics...?

The electronics part of the drive has nothing to do with the physical state of the platters. Therefore, do not tamper with the platters in any way. Do not remove the drive's cover as there is nothing physically wrong with the internal architecture of you drive (based on the info provided above by you).

The PCB contains some of the firmware that is responsible for drive operation as seen here in this paragraph (http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html):

Flash chip stores part of the drive's firmware. When you apply power on a drive, MCU chip reads content of the flash chip into the memory and starts the code. Without such code drive wouldn't even spin up. Sometimes there is no flash chip on PCB that means content of the flash located inside MCU.

or

(http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda- ... d-p/129976)
There are two places where the firmware is stored. The bulk of it is written to a firmware zone in the hidden System Area on the platters, while a small portion of the boot firmware resides in an 8-pin serial flash memory IC on the PCB. This flash memory also stores unique, drive specific "adaptive" information. Therefore a firmware transfer from flash memory to flash memory would be pointless. In fact it would only compound the problem due to wrong adaptives being transferred.

Not sure how the chip got damaged, but maybe perhaps someone where the drive has traveled to actually saved the firmware for backup in case such physical damage occurs. Maybe you can inquire about that.

Have you talked to Seagate?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

8-9 out of 10 simply won't work, 1-2 add more damage if you are unlucky.

Counting me out , I'm quite sure there are many people who can handle the case. What I'm absolutely sure it won't be cheap at all.