Hi,

I was hoping someone can help me with regards my HDD. It is a Maxtor external drive which has stopped working. It is a Seagate ST3500820AS 500GB Barracuda 7200.11.

It was working fine, apart from everytime I tried to eject it it would say it was busy and couldn't be ejected at the moment. I shut down my computer every time before removing it.

Unfortunately it stopped working when my sister was trying to access it so I don't know what exactly happened. She phoned me to say that two laptops weren't recognising it. When I got home and tried it and it wasn't being recognised at all. It was also making a regular beeping noise, approximately every 5 seconds or so. I took it into a local computer shop who opened the casing and tried the hard drive on his computer. He said the hard drive itself was broken. He suggested that I could try buying an identical model and he would try taking the control board of my drive and put it on the new one. I have ordered an identical drive from ebay but it hasn't arrived yet.

What I would like to know is
1) Is there any hope of getting this to work again using the method the shop suggested?
2) Is there any other way of getting the data from the drive?
3) How much would it be to get the data recovered? I live in the UK.

Thank you for any help or suggestions

If it is seized spindle, 1) is useless , answer to 2) is pro help and 3) it depends. It is 80-90 percent seizure, the rest can be everything else.

It could be a stiction fault. If so, then a little percussive maintenance to the casting may dislodge the stuck heads just enough for the motor to overcome the adhesion.

See this Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction#Hard_disk_drives

Do NOT be tempted to hit the motor.

This thread may interest you (it has a few success stories):
samsung-portable-500gb-dead-t14351.html#p99445

See the warnings on page 5 of the following article.

Disk Drive Science (Steve Legg):
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/7803/5/DiskD ... e_copy.pdf

Here are photos of what can go wrong:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15911#p105001

Here are some sound samples from failed drives:
http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php
http://web.archive.org/web/200510160107 ... enDocument

Wonderful idea. If you dislodge the problem too much, usually the broken heads get caught in the magnet - just in case you wonder where did they end . Is this what you potentially really want ? If this is not a fake thread : there is one person in UK I know that can help : pcimage. Or if you don't mind sending a drive to EU , you have plenty of valuable professionals here in each country. this kind of problems usually end happily with data rescued.

No no no!!!

DO NOT try "percussive maintenance" unless the data means nothing to you.

There is a small chance (1-2%)that it might work for you, but the other 98-99% will make the drive 10x harder to recover, if at all possible. At the moment it's probably a £300-£400 job, but if you damage the heads/platters then it's £1,000's.

Your choice.

This isn't scare-mongering, just advice. Take it or leave it

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Ask your sister if she dropped your drive. If so, how far, and was the drive spinning when she did it?

BTW, I suggest you research BlackST's posts. Ask yourself whether he has actually helped anyone, even when the fix was an easy DIY.

If you stick around for a while, you will quickly discover that this forum is not a helpdesk. Rather, it is a fishing pond. The pros will help each other, but they won't lift a finger for you, unless it's to take your money. As for success rates, for cases of stiction that I have seen, it is more like 98% than 2%.

Good luck, and don't let anyone intimidate you.

It is pretty obvious here that you have no concern for the safety of anyones data but instead want to promote yourself as some higher being!

Tell us Frank, how many cases of stiction have you ever seen? In comparison to those of us that do it for a living? I cant personally tell you the actual success of hitting the disk to reset the stiction because it is unprofessional and dangerous and unlike you the safety of the data IS important to me.

Also, do you really believe that this case is something the client can do by DIY? We both know it isnt, but you are too proud to admit that whether it is stiction or a siezed spindle, it is better handled by a professional.

Honestly, hitting the life back into a failed disk? So this how you spent your career as a TV repair tech? With a hammer?

That's right, you can't. You will never see the result of a successful DIY. But I hear and read about them a lot.

In fact, there is no way you can determine whether a head was torn off by percussive maintenance, or by the normal torque of the motor. It is purely speculation on your part.

While on the subject of speculation, it should be noted that neither of your colleagues suggested that the drive may have been suffering from a relatively minor stiction fault, preferring to intimidate the owner with a much more serious, and much more expensive, "stuck spindle" diagnosis.

MBR repairs, deleted data, blown TVS blah blah these are cases of successful DIY, but even these problems can develop complications. Nobody seems to consider that these may be symptomsof other more serious faults. Fortunately in some cases it is not, hence DIY success. But in many other cases they are simply symptoms of a more complex failure.



In either situation further damage is possible, yet you fail to mention this...



Without proper diagnosis it is impossible to say. I would guess its spindle is bad as this accounts for the majority of cases with this symptom. But even if it is sticton, you believe this is something that every end user can repair successfully? I have repaired cases of stiction to find afterwards the surface has developed errors, heads are degraded and recovery is near impossible without specialist equipment and experience to deal with it.

You are quick to point the fact that we fail to suggest a failure could be minor but you fail to point the fact that it could be major.

Honestly, what is your problem here? You slander us for being good at what we do, argue against good advice, and continue to give poor advice to upset users with lost data. Maybe you had a bad experience with some DR yourself? would make sense...

Totally agree.
There's always a catch.

I suggest instead about counting the fake threads and the body count for killed data by stupid advice.Moreover, attacking me personally has the same effect of a fart in outer space, but this is starting to annoy...

Fzabkar, while your knowledge in circuits does impress me; I feel like your advice in regards to problems that are likely stemming from internal mechanical problems is somewhat lackluster, and dangerous.


While I have no problems with you diagnosing a problem as stiction, it is really important that the end-user who is likely looking to try some DIY repair is fully aware of all of the dangers of attempting to fix this type of problem without the proper experience and facilities.

It is also important to explain that even if you where able to fix this current problem; there is no telling what other problems may reveal themselves; and in the case of stiction it is much more likely then not that there will be physical bad sectors that an end user will not be able to properly handle without the proper equipment.



As far as my opinion of this case:

If it was dropped, it's going to be either a stuck spindle, or stiction, and possible even BOTH.

In order to fix ANY of these problems you really need a REAL clean environment. ISO 100 is pushing it, I would recommend ISO 10.

Once you solve problem 1, you will need to make an image of the drive, for this you will really need some hardware that isn't available at your local PC shop.

You may even have to completely replace the head stack, or even transplant the platters depending on a number of factors.

You may open the drive in your clean environment to discover noticeable physical damage to the platters. What happens then?



I don't enjoy being the barer of bad news OP, but unfortunately this type of scenario really does need to go to a Pro. I am sure there will be someone to recommend near you from these boards.

Best Regards,

Drive received and required data recovered 100%

Spindle seized absolutely solid. Fortunately it would appear that it was dropped while off, as the heads were on the parking zone out of harms way. No amount of "percussive maintenance" would have released this spindle!

Heads and platters swapped to good chassis in cleanroom environment, and after some clicking (normal) was able to make head map (H2 was a little weak) and image the folders required. 12,000+ photos saved

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Another + to pcimage

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head map on a seagate... Took forever i imagine =)
Gj PCimage.

A quick addition. Frank linked all the info availible to him. The good AND the bad. Success stories AND photos of disasters. So imho - no need to jump on the mans back like that.

Head map on 7200.11 takes no time at all on UDMA

Sorry if it came across as "jumping on Franks back", it wasn't meant that way.

It's just that in my experience this particular drive very very rarely suffers from stiction especially if from an external caddy, and the lady sounded like the photos were important for her sho I felt the need to chirp up

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Huh =) Id thought that head map through a com terminal would take a while =)
Ill agree. Sticktion on 3.5 inch drive is rare indeed. Most cases its the spindle that is at fault.

Who laugh at the end of the story ?

P.S. someone owe me some beer !

Through com it would, yes. But .11 head maps are done through ATA

Yes, agreed about stiction on 3.5" is rare. I've only ever seen 2 or 3 of these models with it, and literally hundreds with seized spindle.

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Thanks everyone, as PCImage says my photos are now safe and I have learned a very costly lesson about backing up my data. Which since I worked in IT support briefly many years ago you'd think I would have known. And you'll all be relieved to know I no longer work in IT but I am now a nurse so nobody is putting their precious data in my hands!