My laptop’s hard drive (Seagate Momentus 5400.6 SATA 500-GB) failed recently and now laptop (bios) doesn't recognise it.

So I took it out and connected it to an external USB Caddy and then connected the Caddy to my PC (running Windows 7) via USB. Under Device Manger, Disk Drives does recognise it as "Generic External USB Device" which I assume is just the Caddy but nothing under Disk Management, also nothing under bios.

HDD is not making any clicking noise, infect sounds just like any other working HDD when I connect it to the Caddy.

I don’t have any connection that would allow me to connect this 2.5 HDD to my PC.

While ago I read somewhere that by changing the circuit board of a HDD may make it work, do you think I should try this?

Any advise how I can get it working again?

Any advice will be highly appreciated.

Connect it directly to SATA port in your PC.

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data recovery Poland

Thanks,
I’ve connected the HDD direct to SATA port of my PC.

Now, under Disk Management, Disk 2 - Unknown - Not Initialized. When I try to Initialize Disk, MBR and GPT, get following message

Virtual Disk Manager
The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.

Is it seen in BIOS at POST correctly ?

Yes, I believe so

Also tried SeaTools for DOS. It recognised the HDD but Test and Erase Track Zero FAILED.

If you don't need data, get a new drive and move on.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

dont the momentum .6s develop some issues with translator from time to time ?
Need a terminal log for the more in depth look...

@ATZ-007: The information shown so far does not show whether the drive is being correctly recognised by the BIOS - specifically what size is reported. Normally this is shown on the BIOS disk setup page. If the disk capacity is showing an incorrect size, that would be very useful info.

P.S. If you supply a screenshot of the BIOS disk setup screen, please don't attach 0.5MB-2MB image files again. We don't need such large files. A resized JPG, enough to read the characters on the screen, would be sufficient - thanks

[edited to remove my opinion of the likely outcome of DIY]

Bios shows capacity as 0MB. Cylinder, Head, Precomp, Landing Zone and Sector all are shows as 0 (zero)
P.S. apologies for uploading such large files.

Thanks for that - some members are accessing via mobile devices and/or slow links, and appropriate image sizes will help them


That's exactly the info I was looking for, thanks, and it explains the symptoms you're seeing. I suspect it answers the question asked by BlackST too. This "0MB capacity" behaviour fits with there being a translator problem, as suggested by Alexii.

Thanks everyone for your help/advice.
I ended up buying a new HDD