Hi guys.

My friend recently lost a 14 month old samsung spinpoint SP0411N so that his computer started to slow down while in windows then rebooted and the hdd was not recognised.

I tried to see what the problem was and on bootup the drive spins up I can feel and hear it, then it seeks and then shuts down (spins down). It does this each time the power is reconnected.

The drive is recognised by the bios just fine but obviously doesnt respond cause its not spinning/working.

I just happened to have a year newer drive of the exact same model so I unscrewed the controller board from the new drive and placed it on the old drive but the symptom was the same / no help.

I noticed the year newer drive has a different motor manufacturer (JVC vs. NIDEC) and the board layout is slightly different but the main chips are the same.

The drive gives an error code with the HDD light on the computer case but I havent recorded it, I will if you think it is important.

Any ideas if I could still make it spin long enough to recover some data? Luckily nothing critical but annoying loss and inconvenience.

Thanks.

Hello,

It needs to get into a deeper thouch with this drive to rise an accurate diagnosis. I definitely think it cannot be solved by somebody haven't been in Data Recovery for some years, so I suggest to find an authentic company armed with the neccesary tools and knowledge.
sorry...

best regards,
pepe

Thanks for the reply. That's all I really needed to confirm, that it cant be helped without professional tools and knowledge.

Anyhow now I've set up a good backup system for him that daily copies the most important files to a 1GB USB stick and then on fridays a full image of C: is taken with PQDI onto another partition and then burned onto a DVD+RW. I made a quickimage shortcut and nerocmd batch file to make it all very easy.

To make C: smaller I moved the swap file to D: partition, disabled hibernation file and rollback files and told him to put all non-critical large files like games and videos on D: which is not backed up. This way C: with XP and Office and 800MB of my documents and e-mail .dbx is only 2.8GB compressed with PQDI so there is room for growth till 4.3GB

I chose dvd+rw over -rw because it supposedly has a better error tolerance while writing in case dust or a scratch is on the disc. Verbatim 4X dvd+rw and a NEC quality burner.

This still leaves fire and robbery as threaths so some times he will take a DVD-R backup out of the office so a total disaster will be avoided.