This drive has an old ladies (all of, no backups) photos on it so I'm trying to recover it as best as I can. She can't afford any cost involved, so is resigned to their loss.

The drive will spin up and sometimes the bios will recognise it, especially when cold (I've tried the freezer but no better from what I could tell) after spinning up it will spin down and then up again with one click in the middle of the sequence. This just continues.

A visual check of the circuit board shows nothing. Any help at all will be very appreciated.

Ray

Freezer is a very bad idea on this one. From what you say it is hard to determine excatally what is wrong. But you did say it was recognized in BIOS when it was first put on. So this might if you are lucky be a PCB issue where you might just have to get a new PCB and move over adaptive to the new board, clone it to a new HDD using ddrescue and be done with it. But on the other hand it could also be FW issues in the SA, heads, or many other things. If you are apt to do it yourself your only DIY is to find a PCB swap out adaptive and see what happens on this one.

BTW Keep it out of the freezer it will not do you any good on this one.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Thanks Iorana, I'm not sure I understand your comment about adaptive, I can certainly try a new board but it's my understanding that a straight swap won't work because of programming on each board, is that right?

Ray

Yes, that's right.

Does your board have an 8-pin serial flash memory chip ("ROM") at location U12 near the Marvell MCU? If so, then you need to transfer this chip to your replacement PCB.

Otherwise, the "adaptive" data will be stored within the MCU, in which case you will need to find a board supplier who will perform the transfer for you. I have seen people offering this service for between $0 and $95.

If you are prepared for a little work, I can show you how to read the ROM using MHDD (freeware).

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Ok, thanks, now I'm begining to understand. No there's no chip at U12,

I'm going to talk to the lady and see what she wants to do, if she wants to scrap it I just may try it for my own satisfaction.

Thanks again.