My Seagate Barracuda 750GB 7200.11 suddenly stopped working, instead of awakening from sleep mode and is now unrecognized in the BIOS.
I know that it's a long shot to find a board that will make the drive work, rather than doing the BSY fix, BUT
could the disks be damaged by swapping a known good PCB for the one that is not working or is it worth a shot?
I looked up the serial number on the Seagate site and it confirms that a firmware update is available, so it appears to be the BSY problem.
Thanks in advance.

This is DIY at its finest. Assume everything and diagnose nothing. Read up on the Seagate firmware bug before you lose all your data.

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Either swapping a working board can or can't do harm to the disks inside the non-working HDD.
You did not answer the question.

I have not seen one personally be damaged by using another pcb. The fact that you would even want to try another pcb even though they have to be programmed boggles the mind.

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It's mind-boggling to attempt to swap a known good part for a non-working part?

My rudimentary understanding of the problem is that the "bad" firmware causes the disk to seek information where it cannot be found.

If the "bad" command is being stored on the non-working drive's board, then a working board would at least stand a chance of temporarily correcting the problem, assuming the ROM is similar enough to work in the first place.

If the erroneous command is stored elsewhere in the drive, then I could understand why swapping boards would be nothing less than futile.

LOL

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What you are proposing is akin to changing the oil in your car in order to fix a brake problem.

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if you can really diagnose it to the BSY bug, your best bet is to do the the fix, because if you spend the money on a board the firmware on the platter won't match. & there is a chance that you could mess up the preamp on the head assembly. then it really becomes a problem to do that, & say you do change the heads & the new board... technically will still have the BSY bug on your drive...... at least that's my understanding.

Thank-you very much for the good information DrFaustus.
I have another drive that I would have done the board swap with, but I didn't want to try it if there was any possibility of doing damage.

You have a greater chance of shorting the heads by trying to do the fix than you do swapping out a compatible board. Are you for sure that it's a BSY problem, or just guessing?

Please do not waste your time swapping the PCB's, a straight PCB swap will not work in a month of Sundays. The PCB is unique to the drive, even down to the s/n.

The firmware issue is on the platters, not on the PCB on these drives.

If ur determined to DIY, then try the "BSY" fix -- AT YOUR OWN RISK!

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question about boards and live board swaps

raid0 drive (2x 500gb 2.5" drives) [diskA=good,diskB=scratched SA area + dead head] i also have a seperate parts drive

after new head install~

if I was to swap the boards over and get diskB board live and load diskA SA area, then put to sleep, then replace diskB (now diskB is matching with boardB) in order to do an image recovery... using ddrecovery or zar?

is this far fetched?

regards

Brendan

Thanks for the replies, gentlemen.
Once DrFaustus said that it could potentially ruin the preamp, I dropped any thought of doing a board swap.
Pcimage, the fact that the firmware resides on the platters, instead of the pcb confirms the sheer futility of board swapping.
Yes, it is an educated guess that it requires the BSY fix, based upon the fact that on POST the BIOS does not see the drive and the drive exhibited no signs of trouble before the problem began--it just suddenly failed to come out of sleep mode.
I tried the drive in another computer, just to eliminate the possibility of non-hdd problems, like bad cables, power supply, mobo, etc. and the hdd was missing from the BIOS on the other computer, also.
A s/n check on the Seagate site confirmed that this drive is one of those affected by faulty firmware.
If I do succeed in restoring the drive to a usable state, I will be upgrading the firmware.
Of course it's a risk to try any DIY fix on anything that you lack expertise with.
Careful or not, accidents can happen.
If it works out, that's great.
If not, well, you can bet it will be a long-lasting reminder as to why backups need to be done quite regularly.

Nay, nay and thrice NAY!

This will NOT work, due to adaptives, P-List, translator and other isses. Forget about it.

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If your drive has fallen victim to the 7200.11 BSY bug, then see the following thread for a straightforward DIY fix:

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/mes ... 467#M18467

See the following bulletin for an explanation of the BSY bug.

Urgent Field Update. Topic: Drive Hang after Power Cycle:
http://www.expreview.com/img/topic/seag ... Update.pdf

BTW, I believe Seagate is still offering free data recovery for drives affected by the bug.

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Thanks for the reply and the links, fzabkar.
Unless what I've read is wrong, Seagate will only perform the BSY fix for retail drives, while mine is what came installed in my computer.
With these OEM drives, Seagate tells people to deal with whomever made the computer--and they will only replace the drive.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.

You are right. However one persistent client i know with HP24 FW got his data back for free. I have no idea how he managed it and i have a feeling he went through HP and not directly to Seagate.

Is your computer a branded box (eg HP, Dell), or was it assembled by a local computer shop?

Try Seagate's warranty validator:
http://support.seagate.com/customer/war ... dation.jsp

AFAIK, if your drive comes up as being in warranty, then you should be OK.

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