Another St200DM001 HDD failure..

[tektechnician]

Hi everyone,
As you can probably tell, I am a new member of this forum, so if I don't know the formalities of Hdd Guru I do apologise. I have little to no experience in advanced data recovery of storage devices so I may be a bit difficult.

Anyway, I have a 2 and a half year old Seagate st2000DM001 HDD fail on me while in use. It is a 1CH164-306 with the firmware of cc29. I had prior knowledge of a smart warning before the failure from crystal disk info with a warning about reallocated sectors, however I dismissed it because it did not seem abnormal compared to other hdds. Today the drive failed while in use. (It is not the OS drive) Windows would freeze trying to access it and the activity % in win 10 task manager was at 100% while the transfer speed was 0mb/s. On reboot the drive was no longer visible to windows or the bios. When powered on the platter spins up and the heads move to scan the platter and then the platter continues to spin. There is no periodic clicking or buzzing and everything mechanical seems fine. I know that this drive is notorious for firmware issues and the symptoms seem to match firmware damage. At this very moment I have exactly everything backed up except for a 70mb adobe project file which I created yesterday and completed. Seems vain to attempt a recovery for such a small file, but I genuinely do not want to spend another 15 hours remaking it. I have looked around my area and the general consensus for firmware repair is in the neighbourhood of 100-300 aud (70usd to 220usd). I am a student and I am personally not too keen on spending that for a "simple" issue relatively speaking, although I will most likely do that if recovering diy style is downright stupid in the end.
How would I go about repairing my HDD diy style? Is there anything I can do without special tools or am I stuck with a Seagate brick?

[jermy]

the question is is it really a FW problem or is it weak/bad heads and or media damage which is also common in this drive

[RolandJS]

If you want to avoid another 15 hours of Adobe work, I think you have a fork in the road created by your accidental ignoring the SMART
/ sector-reallocation warning:
1) usb/dvd boot & clone HD as is, put the clone away for safe-keeping, and try a non-writing/read-only DIY data recovery utility that can hopefully locate and extract that Adobe file
OR
2) send HD off, with or without a clone in your closet, to a DR specialist

[tektechnician]

the question is is it really a FW problem or is it weak/bad heads and or media damage which is also common in this drive

I don't think it's a problem with the headers otherwise the HDD would otherwise spin down? Likewise I doubt weak/bad heads would cause the drive to report 100% activity in Windows while idling, it seems almost like a BSY issue. However I am getting a USB to UART adaptor and will try connect to the drive and see what it says. I was going to try follow this guide https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/Home in diagnosing the HDD. I understand the guide is for 7200.11 HDDs and not the 7200.14, but I'm assuming the only different commands would be the partition regeneration and the smart erase. Can someone explain what the partition regeneration command is?  (F3 T>m0,2,2,0,0,0,0,22).

[tektechnician]

If you want to avoid another 15 hours of Adobe work, I think you have a fork in the road created by your accidental ignoring the SMART
/ sector-reallocation warning:
1) usb/dvd boot & clone HD as is, put the clone away for safe-keeping, and try a non-writing/read-only DIY data recovery utility that can hopefully locate and extract that Adobe file
OR
2) send HD off, with or without a clone in your closet, to a DR specialist

Yeah I know it seems pretty stupid, but I honestly didn't really understand the SMART warning and I had checked several times over periods of months and the reallocated sector value didn't change.

[tektechnician]

Hi everyone,

I have gotten my data off the HDD by hot mounting it through my motherboard which bypasses the bios detection period.
It is still locked at 100% activity, but there are brief periods of operation where I can access my HDD.
Thank you to those who helped and roasted me, I will be working off my Seagate Ironwolf HDD and SSD from now on.
Is there any program which can live maintain file unity between drives?

[fzabkar]

You can make the drive less unstable by disabling certain parameters.

Seagate F3 Arch - Patching the 093 sysfile :
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=1842

[3pointGordon]

Surprising that you were able to get all the data off of it. At least there's that