Hi All,

Can anyone give me some advice on what to do?

I have a Maxtor STM31000528AS fireware CC38. It will power on but only remain accessible for about 5-10 minutes, then it goes off line. No usual sounds come from the drive. Spins up a normally and remains spun up.

Figuring it might be a HDD Circuit board problem, I managed to find exactly the same drive (Maxtor STM31000528AS) except this had firmware CC35. I have swapped over the circuit boards but they don't work.

Sorry, now for the questions?
- If I upgrade the firmware on the new drive from CC35 to CC38, will the circuit board then work on the old drive so I can recover the files?
- Or can I copy from the old drive (CC38) to the new drive (CC35) the firmware and settings?, would the new board work on the old drive?
- What software should I use to do this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, the drive came out of my Wife's computer, which she hasn't done backups for a long time.

Thank you.
Adram

Very much doubt it's a FW or PCB issue.

Most likely bad sectors.

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Adram. Your drive is failing and would need to be cloned to a replacement. You might be lucky and be able to copy your important files and folders using recovery software. In either case it would be a good idea to remove the drive from the system and position an external fan to blow cool air towards the drive while cloning or copying the data. Lowering the drive temp can often help keep it on line!
IF THE DATA IS REALLY IMPORTANT TO YOU THEN GIVE IT TO A PRO WHO WILL DO IT FOR YOU FOR A RESONABLE CHARGE.
pcimage who posted here could do that for you so make direct contact with him.

Good luck!

I think that your "Maxtor" drive is indeed a Seagate one - a 7200.12 drive.
Most likely bad sectors as stated.

Stop playing with the PCB swapping that WILL NOT WORK unless you move the ROM chip to the new PCB (and will not solve your problem at all).

At this point you better send the drive to someone with a cloning hardware device as PC-3000 DE, DDI4 or MRTLab tool to attempt to clone the drive after disabling relocation.

If you are going to attempt it by yourself and RISK loose all the data for good you can start by getting a TTL adaptor :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=192

Connect it to the drive :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=193

Disable relocation by TTL :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=557


Attempt to clone the drive with ddrescue :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=117&t=1160


Regards.

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Please note that you might kill up the drive heads in the process and then price for a professional recovery will be way more expensive and if the platters get damaged it might turn the recovery impossible to do.

Some experiments with a 10 years old outdated Hardware Cloning / FW tool here should be able to exemplify the power of hardware cloning (hopefully with a good updated tool like PC-3000, DDI4, etc) VS software only cloning (DDRescue or others) :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=1183
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=1184

Regards and good luck.

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