Fujitsu MHV2160BT - Spinning, but not detected on

[terraner]

Hi everyone,

I'm absolutely new here! But I got an old Fujitsu 2,5" HDD (namely MHV2160BT) I definitly could use some help with.

Symptoms:
The drive is spinning well (without any wierd sounds) and with a healthy soft "click" when I shake it (softly), but that does NOT show up in BIOS! This occured all of the sudden, without any warning...

Motivation:
There're lots of photos on it I'd like to get back.

What I did:
- First I tried every possible cable/BIOS settings combination, but soon considered the drive somewhat damaged.
- Then I managed to get my hands on a drive with nearly identical serial number (up to 3 digits) and produced in the same month!
I tried to fix it by simply exchanging PCBs, but this did not help (same symptoms: spinning well, but no reaction at all)

1.) The most important question: What could be wrong with the drive?

2.) Would it be helpful to access it via RS232 and tinker with the firmware like I found here?
I did some fiddling here, but I'm not sure whether the setup is correct:

The drive is connected to:
- SATA power supply
- 5V power source
- TX/RX are connected to the RS232 adapter
- GND is connected with the RS232 adapter AND the power source' ground

This way putty seems to find at least ANYTHING, as it leaves me with a blank window with a cursor (and does not quit with an error).

3.) What options I have anyway if I managed to access the drive via COM terminal? (Obviously depends on 1...)

Thanks a lot in advance for any help or hints!

[BlackST]

It is a FUJITSU not a SEAGATE .

[terraner]

Hey BlackST,

sure, but this attempt only shows my desperation...

Is there any documentation of these procedures or the console interface? Or at least some general guidlines when I have to try it on my own? As far as I can tell, there is no documentation of the MHV.. anywhere on the web (except the user manual telling you how to plug in SATA cables), and Fujitsu sold its disk division to Toshiba - and they don't have any information on these old drives either.

So... any other information? Thanks!

[jerovsek]

terraner,

if photos are valuable for you, then find some DR specialist to recover your photos.

[terraner]

Hey,

I finally decided that I will NOT pay ~800-1000€ for a professional recovery. After that decision - mentally writing off my photos - I decided tried to do a head-replacement myself. For anyone in a similar situation here's what I did.

Basically I followed these videos:
Advanced Hard Drive Data Recovery Part 1 (through 5, to get an overview and first impression how (im)possible this was)
VERY important trick that saved my day (my drive had 3 platters/6 heads)
HddSurgery - Head replacement process on 2.5" Seagate hard drives (which was very similar to my drive, and I followed the order of removing parts)

I was lucky and with a new head-unit and new board it eventually worked: It showed up in BIOS, with the help of ddrescue I was able to recover ~159850MB/160000MB (only 158MB loss!!) into an image-file (took about 17hours; there were two defective areas with about 2GB/10GB size). testdisk was a help in recovering the partition I was looking for, and then I was able to fsck and simply mount the img-file and copy the files from it.
Some of the image files were defective, but it was only a hand full (maybe 10-20 files of 30+GB!!!!). Obviously I cannot tell how many I lost completely, but as scanned through them and it looked VERY good.

As far as I can tell the defect was caused by one of the six heads: the PCB the head sat on had been glued to its arm, but somehow the glue was gone and the head hang down (and eventually touched the disk).

Cheers

[fzabkar]

Where there's a will, there's a way.