Recovery of a Seagate become unknown not initialized

[Giova_B]

Hello gentlemen, I have a this problem:

Connecting my old Seagate ST31500341AS to the new PC I assembled (Asus prime b450-plus with AMD ryzen 3 with Win 10 PRO) it found some errors.
I asked to fix them and after a while the window got frozen. I forced the window to close and did other things.

After a while looking at the performance in task manager I noticed that disk was running at 100% activity continously.
Tried to restart the system but it got stuck on the restart page so I forced the shutdown by pressing the power button.

Next, I turned it on and the disk had disappeared; looking at disk management I found it as unknown not initialized and with no info about capacity.

By clicking on it, it tells me to initialize it and makes me choose whether MBR or UEFI (the disk is/was MBR).

Checking it from the BIOS, it only recognizes the model but cannot read the S.M.A.R.T. information.

I have tried some disk analysis software, either from Win or from bootable USB but they all just can't see the disk/cannot be selected.

The sound it produces at power up seems fine, without weird noise.

Inside I have 20 years of photos, videos and more and you can imagine how I feel.

At this point I am undecided between:

A) initialize it from disk management and then try to see if some recovery software can see the disk

B) change the PCB and see if I can get access to the data.

What do you recommend?

Thank so much for any advice you might give me.

[aekhv]

A) and B) will no take affect for you. And the PCB is fine. It looks like your drive has a common problem - bad-blocks, SA and/or translator problem, background activity (offline defect management), etc. Regular data recovery software wll not help. Bring your drive to a nearest data recovery lab if your data is really important.

And if your data is really-really-really important stop doing useless actions like disk initialization, etc...

[fzabkar]

Your model is essentially the same as the "Maxtor" in this thread:

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=38411

[Giova_B]

Thanks guys for your replies, I'll check that thread out cause I see it could be a similar problem and see what's the best solution for my case.

[Giova_B]

Hello,

sorry for being junior here, after a month of reading about data recovery and with the help of the collective knowledge on this forum and others I managed to have a display of a terminal console at power-up.

Here it is:

**********************************************
▒
Rst 0x20M
(P) SATA Reset
PASSPackage Verified
No Phy: Staggered spin bypass
(H) SATA Reset
SSPSaveSettings

SSPRestoreSettings

Send Status: COMRESET seen
Set Transfer Mode selected
PIO selected
Set Transfer Mode selected
Ultra DMA selected
Starting LBA of RW Request=00000040 Length=FFFFFFFF
ProcessRWError -Read- at LBA 00000040 Sense Code=43110081
InitiateMarkPendingReallocateRequest for disc_lba: 00000040
FAILED to spare!

(H) SATA Reset
SSPSaveSettings

SSPRestoreSettings

Send Status: COMRESET seen
InitiateMarkPendingReallocateRequest for disc_lba: 0236A589

******************************************************

For what I understand is a common problem of these drives.

I please need some advices on how to proceed.

I think my next move would be giving these F commands that I got from a post from Spildit here:
https://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php ... 2&start=60

F"READ_SPARING_ENABLED",0,22
F"WRITE_SPARING_ENABLED",0,22
F"OFFLINE_SPARING_ENABLED",0,22
F"DAR_ENABLED",0,22
F"DISABLE_IDLE_ACTIVITY",1,22
F"BGMS_DISABLE_DATA_REFRESH",1,22
F"ABORT_PREFETCH",1,22
F"READ_LOOKAHEAD_DISABLED_ON_POWER_UP",1,22
F"READ_CACHING_DISABLED_ON_POWER_UP",1,22
F"RWRecoveryFlags",00,22
F"BGMSFlags",00,22
F"PerformanceFlags",043C,22
F"MediaCacheControl",00,22

My goal is to use hddsuperclone in order to recover all the data, but I need to stabilize it in some way, because hddsuperclone doesn't recognize the drive in this state.

Should I give those commands or someone can guide me in giving other commands/displays etc.

Thanks for anyone who can help me.