Seagate 7200.12 failed drive- need some advice

[ledoktre]

Greetings all;

I have been trying to recover data off of a failed hard drive for a friend. It is a ST31000528AS (Barrracuda 7200.12) 1TB drive, firmware AP24. According to my friend, the MO is that the computer would occasionally have "slow spells", and was gradually slowing down over time until just the other day he went to boot his Mac and it won't do anything. I wish I had known about the problem earlier, and I would have told him to get that drive replaced ASAP. Alas...

What it is doing for me on my computer via USB adapter (when booting into Debian with drive attached directly, it keeps trying to remap bad sectors and doesnt want to finish booting) is this. When you turn the drive on, it clicks what I feel is a little bit strange when you first power it up, but it settles down to be pretty quiet shortly after that. When I try to read it with ddrescue, it gets in about 500MB, and stops. 999GB errors- instantly. Since I had noticed on the console that there was some issues with the "buffer I/O errors", I thought I'd try ddrescue with the direct read switch. Again, gets to about 500MB, this time speed goes to 0, and no matter how long I leave it run, it just sits there counting up more sectors it can't read.

When I view the drive in mhdd, it says security is high, but off (I wondered if a Mac would somehow be locked to only work on a Mac). When I tried to do a seek/read test, it fails almost immediately and the drive spins down. When I tell it to test the drive, it goes in again about 500MB, and then starts reading red X's. I am not too familiar with this software, so please bare with my simple descriptions.

I was wondering if a drive that is making some unusual clicking noise (not a ton), but fails on a seek test would benefit from a board swap (which I believe I would have to order), or if I am wasting my time by messing with it. I'd like to recover this for him if at all possible.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim

[harddrivespecialist]

Looks like read/write head/s failed. You will need pro assistance with it in order to recover data from that drive. More you mess with it, more expensive it will become or will be deemed unrecoverable.

[ledoktre]

Thanks for the reply. I've been wanting to invest in the equipment necessary to learn to work on the internal components, but I also recognize it takes time and practice (not just reading extensively about it as I have now), and practicing on a friend's hard drive is not right. I will advise him to have a professional look at it.

Anyone here interested in the job and/or how much it might cost (with the information at hand)?

Thanks,