Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
December 30th, 2014, 5:30
Dear All,
Though not being accessed alot, all of a sudden this drive started clicking now and then. It wasn´t till a week after it started that I decided to find out WHICH of my drives that had this issue, so I fired up HDTune to see where it´d be having issues. It was obvious which one was the bad drive, as when chosen and starting the hdtune speedtest, the clicking happened.
So I took out the drive, and hoped for some magic when hooked up to my USB to sata cable, but now it seems to not anymore show up in Windows. It spins up for 3-5 secs, clicks 5-10 times and then spins down.
Could this be the PCB and which are the methods you´d recommend me to use for repairing this? The freezer trick - is that any good? A recovery here cost EUR 400 at least so I´m hoping that´s not a step I need to take..
Thanks in advance
Jazzl
December 30th, 2014, 8:28
Most propably, bad heads, bad firmware. It is not a DIY.
December 30th, 2014, 9:16
Thanks for this quick answer.
So, "bad firmware" is not a DIY = upgrading it? Does this mean that a crappy firmware may have corrupted the drive?
Best Regards
Jazzl
December 30th, 2014, 9:20
Let's start with the basics. A colleague has a terminal? If so, let them connect the drive and attach the log start here.
December 30th, 2014, 9:50
jazzl wrote:Though not being accessed alot, all of a sudden this drive started clicking now and then. It wasn´t till a week after it started that I decided to find out WHICH of my drives that had this issue, so I fired up HDTune to see where it´d be having issues. It was obvious which one was the bad drive, as when chosen and starting the hdtune speedtest, the clicking happened.
These drives suck and are not easy to recover data from, even for the pros.
So I took out the drive, and hoped for some magic when hooked up to my USB to sata cable, but now it seems to not anymore show up in Windows. It spins up for 3-5 secs, clicks 5-10 times and then spins down.
With this model of drive, as was mentioned above, it is likely heads, surface and/or firmware issues...likely all three. The window of opportunity is small, so don't power the drive on any more, if you want your data recovered.
Could this be the PCB and which are the methods you´d recommend me to use for repairing this? The freezer trick - is that any good? A recovery here cost EUR 400 at least so I´m hoping that´s not a step I need to take..
There are no tricks to recovering these drives and definitely no point in wasting money on a PCB that would be better saved to put towards the cost of a pro. As I just said, the window of opportunity is very small with these drives. You have to decide now whether or not you want to get it assessed by a pro. The odds of you recovering the data yourself is very low and the odds that your attempts will kill the drive completely or increase the price for a pro significantly are very high.
There are many data recovery pros on this forum who are located in Europe. I suggest you make contact with one and have them assess your drive so you can know just how bad it really is.
December 30th, 2014, 9:52
The drive´s at home, and it´s not where the system partition so I´d be able to do what it is that you suggest from any of my computers.
But to enter terminal mode, I will need some sort of adapter, right? It would not be enough to have it connected via my SATA to USB adapter? (drive is SATA, adapter connects to PC via USB).
Thanks again
December 31st, 2014, 9:49
Past experience with these drives tells me there's a very high chance of media (platter) damage, which has killed the heads. A pro will swap heads, for these most likely to fail too after a short time.
Seagate DM are horrible, not very high success rates due to media damage, I'm with Luke on this one.
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