another Seagate ST3500320AS 500gig drive question

[buddyholly]

Hi all,

My apologies for what, I imagine, will be another noob question for those of you who frequent this board
but please humour me and perhaps try and let me know where I stand with this drive...

History - It was primary OS drive (XP SP2), XP locked up for no particular reason, when restarted it blue screened

Symptoms-
When powered on, I can hear drive spin up and what sounds like the heads quickly zipping around for a sec or 2
The drive is identified in Bios, and XP Disc management (where it shows as approx 480gig or so of unallocated space)
thinking for whatever reason the MBR had been corrupted tried unsuccessfully to restore / write new MBR

HDDScan recognises the drive - won't complete any SMART tests (they just seem to restart before ever getting to the end)

verify / read surface tests finish but every block is reported as BAD

"GetDataBack" recognises the drive, will attempt to read but reports every block of sectors as unreadable with the "1117 I/O error"

To my uneducated self - it doesn't sound like the same problem that many others have/had which is why I'm
after an educated opinion as to whether a pcb swap may allow the drive to be read and possibly some piccys / email etc recovered - maybe 100-200meg or so - I do have an incremental backup routine but it crapped out day before next one was due:)

Thanks for your time if you got this far

[shahij]

Its SA. No end user solution. Pro can help. Approximate $800 have to pay.

[BlackST]

A little more than 800$... This is the rate.

[pcimage]

Could also be a bad head (or two, there's six in there)

[buddyholly]

Thanks for your estimates / help - As I alluded to in a PM to Shahij the data certainly isn't "life changing" if I don't get it back
- just some piccys of pets and my house under construction along with a weeks worth of emails

Thanks anyway I think I'll just throw it away - they're cheap enough that I couldn't be bothered RMA'ing it and getting
another drive back from them that will probably fail sooner rather than later

Cheers

BJ