I have a machine that will no longer detect my samsung terra at bios. It seems to make the boot up noise and everything but it wont detect it at all. It does detect my other sammy but not this drive. I tried it in another machine and i get the same problem.

I swapped the circuit board from my working drive to the non working and still nothing. I have quite a bit of data on there if i can get it to boot that would be great and copy it all over.

Before this happened every now and then when i turned the machine on it would not show it as being detected. If i powered off the system a few times and turned it on it would come back, i thought it might be because it was Pentium 4 and it was old and dying but when i put it in my i3 it doesnt work.

This is not a PCB problem more than likely. Lately I have seen some samsungs that have a lot of bad sectors and read probelms on them. They can clone but not so well and there is a lot of data loss on them. It can also be a problem internal to your heads or SA adaptives. You will more than likely need some professional help on this one and it is not a DIY fix that you could handle at home. Sorry to say this one to you I am sure it is not what you wanted to hear on it.

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Iorana Haraharaini

The disk most likely giving a busy signal, you may need to update the disk firmware if you have to have any chances of actual recovery.
kindly get a tool that will allow you to update the firmware of the drive to clear the issue

Gikuyu.
Data Handlers

Check it in MHDD.
If its BUSY (BSY), wait a few minutes maybe it will be detected.

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data recovery Poland

This is not correct advice

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

So the hard drive is probably dead and not in a bsy state? Its weird i have had drives crash on me before with hdd clicking. But a drive that works fine when its in windows i can access all the files and everything then on next boot its not detected.

Could it somehow have gotten locked to the old board?

You said lately samsungs have had bad sectors i thought the HD103SJ was the most popular reliable drive?

Yes it might have a PW lock on it. This one can happen and I have seen where it has happened on some occassion on laptop HDD when the system was doing a defrag or other read/write function to the HDD and the drive locked up and on reboot the drive was in a locked state. This one is hard to determine if this is actually your problem on this one. But a FW flash of the PCB is the wrong way to go on this one. FW flash on HDD considering they are not cell phone is not a good idea at all.

I might suggest that you let us now where in the US you are located and we can recommand someone in your area to take a look at this drive for you and let you know what is wrong with it. To second guess is hard to do and it should be properly looked at now to determine what is actually wrong with it and to save your data that is one it. If you try to follow some advise here for flashing FW then for sure you are putting your data at risk in this one.

About Samsung I am only giving you statistics from what I see here on the recoveries that come in here to me. I had a Samsung that could not been seen in BIOS and could not be read at all. But when I examined this one I found out that the drive was readable with my tools and could be IDed correctly. In the imaging process I found that there was a lot of bad sectors in this drive and it was not for only one head on it. The person told me the drive worked fine one day and then after he could no longer read it.

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Iorana Haraharaini

I thought seagate were the most problematic drives. On this forum and others it seems thats true. Which brand is the most stable then?

I managed to get it to boot. When the machine was on in windows booted from another hdd, i plugged the sammy in and restarted it showed up. I powered down to connect another terra so i could clone it. Same thing not detected. So i unplugged it while it was on and replugged and it showed up in bios.

I ghosted it. I am going to rma this drive now.