Hi there.

I tried a DIY fix of a Seagate Barracuda ST3500320AS with BSY error and got it back to the state where the bios does see it with full capacity, but the rest of the booting is slow. Win 7 is able to see the partition letters some times and I can go to the root of one of the partitions in the command-window.
Checkdisk (chdsk) doesn't want to work on any of the partitions and the Disk Manager which comes with Windows doesn't see much more than the drive itself and it's partitions..
I made a SMART test with SeaTools and its fine.. but I didn't try the other tests as I was unsure if they would do more bad than good.

As I already 'wasted' 1 day on this and it doesn't look like I'm getting anywhere anytime soon as noob I'd rather not screw it up (more?) by doing something very stupid.
The drive contains a photo-collection and some personal documents in one partition and some folders with mails in the main partition which would need to be rescued.

I already contacted Seagate about this and and they will replace the drive.. for DR they advised me to contact someone local.

So, anyone got a pointer for me?
Thanks!

If there is no good DR service here I could send it to pcimage.co.uk and hope for an 'easy' fix to my problem, surely the procedure for this particular drive must be pretty 'straight forward' now with so many cases and experience, or?

Any readouts I can do with the terminal or other software that would help closing in on the failure in particular and make a cost estimation more accurate?

Too late for 'easy fix'...

Sure, but if you read about 1500 bucks to get your data off from a drive that has just a 'little' hickup in some bits from one boot to the next, you naturally look for the cheapest way first.
And as I'm not totally left-handed and the DIY guides sounded pretty reasonable I went down that road.

I asked for a quote from payam.com.au and wait for their response..
Any thoughts on their capabilities?

There is a missing partition on your drive.
You have to rebuild it.

Sometimes those drives seem to have a bug, but it could be caused by many bad sectors on your drive. Bad sectors could be due to media damage or other physical, logical failures.

In any case, make sure to make an image of your drive to a healthy one and then proceed with recovery of missing partition.

Professional recovery should be very inexpensive at present condition. You might want to go with safe way by spending few dollars.

_________________
www.datarecoveryne.com

Can also be because the original problem was NOT pinpointed and the "one fits all" fix was applied : if there was a specific issue, data is now garbled (don't ask, I CAN'T explain).

P.S. of course the SMART is fine now : one part of the mentioned "fix" clears SMART , no ?

Don't believe everything you are told in this forum, especially from the self proclaimed gurus. BlackST's only raison d'etre seems to be to dissuade people from DIY, to protect his easy income.

If professional data recovery is too expensive for you, then your best approach is to clone your drive sector-by-sector using tools that understand how to work around bad sectors.

ddrescue and dd_rescue are two Linux based utilities that can clone a drive in multiple passes. They image the easy sectors on the first pass, and attempt the more difficult ones on subsequent passes. They can also image a drive in reverse. Reverse imaging effectively
disables look ahead caching.

ddrescue: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
dd_rescue: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

Comparison between ddrescue and dd_rescue:
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

HDClone is a Windows based imager:
http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Get a life, mister, sleep some more and do something for this obsession...

Drive is already on it's way to a DR here in Australia.. so no need to ask me via pm if you can have the job. Thanks for all who have pm'ed me.
I'll keep you in the loop about what happend.