Hi Everyone. Just a quick thank-you in advance for sharing your knowledge.

I have a Lacie 250 USB with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 (IDE). I have not been able to access the very sensitive data on this drive, and can't afford data recovery right now. Here is what happened:

First, the drive did not appear under "my computer", but did show up under the disk management snap-in as "Unallocated" and under the Device Manager as "working properly". MBR and Partition table software such as Acronis Recovery Expert and Partition Table Doctor tried to fix the drive, but froze 1/3 through the process each time. Finally, during one of these passes, the drive was no longer recognized even by the disk management snap in, or the Bios, and showed up under the Device Manager as "code 10".

However, the drive spins up fine, even if it whines slightly louder than usual... I have hooked it up as an internal IDE drive in many jumper configurations and tried to run Seatools, which of course also does not recognize the drive. I feel very frustrated, because this drive is not a classic case of HD failure - I am sure the data is quite safe on the platters. I just can't access it!

I feel the controller has failed - does this sound correct to you? If so, how do I approach fixing the problem without resorting to a data recovery service. If I must resort to professional data recovery - what are the most reasonable firms?

Again, thank you for contributing to this forum and sharing your knowledge.

Hello,

From your description I suspect some kind of FW damage along with some bad sectors on the surface. It is also possible that one or more heads are failing.
Should the drive be not spinning maybe swapping the PCB with an apropriate one can solve some of the problem, but in this case U still have to deal with the bad sectors problem U had initially.

regards,
pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Hello again,


An update: I bought an identical PCB with the same firmware (3.01) for the seagate barracuda 7200 drive. A Computer Science major friend helped me swap the two.

When loaded as a slave into this computer, the drive spun up just as before - sounded healthy but a little loud. However, even with the new PCB, the drive is not recognized by the BIOS, My Computer, or the disk management snap-in.

I cannot understand the problem. The hardware seems fine. I replaced the circuit board. Same result! The data is really important to me, but I just don't have the cash to pay for data recovery (the PCB cost me $130 from Ultratec).

If you have any ideas, please share them with me. I'm starting to feel desperate.

Where are you based?

US or UK?

If Uk, I'll help you out if u send me the drive.

Sean

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

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