Seagate Fails with a Little Help from its Owner/Installer

[gfwak]

Seagate ST3120814A, 120 Gig's been running for about a year and suddenly... gonzo. Here's the point of shame: I apparently installed it with the jumper in the mirror of the appropriate position. I know, I know... I shouldn't brag.

Booted to Spinrite 6 and it looked for a while that the future was bright for my three months worth of unbackedup photos and then.. pfft. Spinrite spent a day and a half stuck. Rebooted to resume beyond the the stall spot and the drive and anything else on that IDE controller doesn't show. If it's slaved along with the system disk, NT Loader is missing and nothin'. IDE2 same behavior. Seagate will replace the drive free of charge, but they quote $1400 bucks to restore. Is one season of Little League baseball worth that? My eight year old is good, but... let's face it, I can wrap the drive up and give it to him as a gift when he gets to be a doctor and he can bleed for Seagate.

Froze it. Tried every jumper setting. Installed in another machine. Nothing.

Any advice? (aside from "be more careful when jumpering")

[cryoborgofthevenus]

Seems to me it's very bad condition. May be you can check by using MHDD whether it's still possible to read from its surface or not.

You'd better do this with only one damaged hard drive connected to the PC. Unplug any hard drive or you might get into trouble.

Now get MHDD floppy or MHDD CD,.

Set your pC to boot from CD/floppy.

You may connect the IDE cable (but not the power connector !)

If the system already booted to MHDD>

Press Shift+F2 or Shift+F3, if the drive initiates, the surface must be checked first. Using F4 you might see what the real problem is....

[pepe]

Hi

when should he apply power? I suppose before the last step...

pepe

[gfwak]

I guess the drive is toast. Disconnected all mass storage except cd-rom (to run MHDD) and booted. MHDD loaded fine. Hooked up the damaged drive and attempted to detect. No listing. I guess the summer of '07 will be but a memory. I'll be fine after a good cry. sniff sniff

Thanks

[gfwak]

maybe i can find a pcb with same firmware, eh?

[cryoborgofthevenus]

Hi

when should he apply power? I suppose before the last step...

pepe

Oh yes sir pepe...my mistake....

[gfwak]

In my attempts to track down the replacement PCB for this disk, I've asked those selling them (on ebay and elsewhere) to identify the firmware versions and any other telling data on their drives, but none is willing to do so. The ST3120814A appears to be a very common drive. I don't mind buying a few of these drives and trying them out, provided I willl be able to reassemble the drives and use afterward. My questions are: when a pcb is swapped from one drive to another, is swapping the thing back to its original drive a big deal? Will I be ruining disk's whose PCB's don't work with the bad drive, even if I carefully follow advice regarding the swap?

[cryoborgofthevenus]

Hmmm...just make sure that the problem is not from damaged preamplifier. Otherwise you may encounter a new PCB damaged also

[gfwak]

How does one go about ensuring preamplifier is not damaged, is working... within nominal limits?

[cryoborgofthevenus]

Remove the PCB. Test the Data pin channel with multimeter grounded.