Seagate 7200.11 gone bad

[Metatron]

Hy;

I got a ST31500341AS gone bad.
The drive worked (after lots of problems over the last months) "fine" untill this morning. Then it presumely turned off while the PC was operating, I wasn't there. The drive didn't come up on reset, so I turned off the machine, turned it on and the drive spinned up, then 11 clicks, then spinned down. There is a very very faint high frequency "bump" right after the big click-clacks of the head, seems the motor. In the beginning the drive still showed up as ST315, but now it got all bad:

Model: ST_M13FQBL
Serial: QNR_BFW
FW: 1117
LBA: 8089950

It apparently is a well know issue. I may tell a bit about the context, we do have often very hard power-offs here (central america), and I just have a regulator, no battery. The drive survived lots of them but I suppose it's tolerance reached it's end. The moment it shut down in the morning there hasn't been a power-off since a few weeks. In the last year or so it sometimes made one click after tunrning on the machine and it worked. There was a critical time like half a year ago when it clicked 4-5 times and sometimes it didn't came up, but that time passed and the disk didn't made any sounds thereafter. In the last week of operation (this last week) the drive had very hard time writing to the paging-file which was at the beginning of the drive, often blocking windows for a minute or more.

I was wondering if I can do something in respect by myself, or if someone needs to access the PCB with a serial cable.
It is not really critical to me because its death was more than anounced, and I actually did a 90% backup, so I'm not totally destoyed or something. I'm just curious if the drive could be repaired fe.

[dmarques]

Hi,

It's not a DIY job, as heads are almost for sure damaged and need to be replaced.

If you have 90% of the data backuped up, my advice is throw it to the garbage.

[Metatron]

Oh, that bad ...
I have guarantee until march, so I guess I'll just start RMAing now.
Thanks

[dmarques]

So it's better, at least you'll get a new drive.

[mr_spokk]

Or a nice refurbished one

Bosse

[dmarques]

Most probably

[BlackST]

To me heads are not really bad, but should see the drive to confirm. In that case can be fixed. But as it is still under warranty, RMA it.