Hey guys, long time reader first time poster here.
So, my wife's notebook HDD pretty much stopped responding from one day to the next.

Upon extraction I found out it was one of these Kahuna SSHD monsters (ST1000LM014 FW:LVD5), the disk wouldn't spin, show up, nada.

Got a bunch of donor drives from a friend and tried swapping the pcbs, the disk spins up but ofcourse as expected, shows up as being 0b, thus the data is not accessible.
Everything points to be a corrupted Nand.

I do have another drive with the exact FW, I've read here and on different sites that secure erasing the donor drive and then swapping the PCB works on these cases.
Has anyone here have experience with this?

Is it possible to get it working, flushing the nand, without having to go with the PC3K route? (I'm an amateur enthusiast and don't have access to the fancy hw tools)
What do you recommend using for the secure erase? Seatools?
Any info would be really appreciated, we live in Uruguay so as you may imagine there aren't many data recovery solution places around...
Anyway, thanks in advance!
Best,

Bruno

I don't think you'll be able to accomplish what you want without one of those fancy tools. Clearing the NAND is ultimately accomplished by sending a simple command over TTL to. However, the problem is that Seagate locked the terminal and to unlock it you need to modify the ROM code on the PCB to allow terminal access. That's the hard part.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Deleted. Wrong msg

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Sexy Womans from your town

Are you trying to recover the data or just make the drive work again? If you want to recover secure erase is not the way to go! CBL is located in Montevideo, they should be able to recover your wife's data. if you don't need the data back just bin the drive. like data-medic said this is not a DIY.

http://www.cbltech.com.uy

If it is just a case of bad NAND, it should be a cheap fast recovery. I just did one this week for $400 CAD (~ $300 USD).

That said, the process you are referring to "might" work, but will still require you to move the ROM chip from the patient to the donor board after you secure erase the donor and before you connect it to the patient, assuming that the FW version matches. But, whatever you do, don't damage that ROM chip or you will be in a huge world of hurt.

Obviously, your safest bet is to send it to a reputable data recovery professional.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Thank you for the reply!
Yea, I knew about them, but waaay out of budget, I might try and send the drive to my brother in the states, surely have more options there. All I'm looking to recover are the pictures on the drive, she had downloaded all the pictures of our first years of our daughter there and forgot to drop them on our family dropbox, so we have no backups.

This is really frustrating given that I have another exact drive with the same FW and everything. So without some pro help im dead in the water, is there NOTHING i can try?

Thanks again,

Best,

B

Thank you for your reply,
I have experience doing the rom chip swap on other "normal" models, so that is not an issue for me. My issue is the whole NAND flushing part, I could't find anywhere online a definite walk through on the process. If a normal secure wipe will do the trick or what exactly.

One thing is sure, I'm never using one of these drives again.

Thanks again,

Best,

B