Hello Everyone,
I have two Seagate Barrcuda 7200.10 250Gb drives. Both have been working fine for 5/6 years until yesterday.
My second drive ("data") was preventing the pc from powering up. I discovered this after disconnecting power from every device in turn until my PC actually started.
A bit of side-by-side multimeter testing on the two PCBs showed that there was definitely a short on the bad drive somewhere. I put the PCB from the good drive onto the other one and this time the pc powered up and went into startup! Yay! The drive was now spinning.
BUT: the drive is not recognised by any OS. Further investigation shows that the BIOS is not recognising it either.
I was hoping that the well documented 7200.11 BSY fix (
https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/) would help but further reading on this forum suggests it's only for the 7200.11 and not the 7200.10.
I really, REALLY need the data on that drive but don't want to pay huge money to a data recovery company.
Next step is to try some sort of SMART diagnostic (like
http://www.hdsentinel.com/) but I have no experience with these.
I'm not a hardware expert but am fairly adept at minor home electonics (soldering and the like). I am a programmer too (by profession) so I not afraid of using HyperTeminal or hooking up a RS232 to the drive to see if I can get any info from it. I just don't know what to look for or if it is even worth my while trying.
Any help would be appreciated.