Recently my 500gb seagate momentus 5400.6 2.5" serial ATA HDD stopped working I am currently using a 320gb hard drive i had laying around but would like to get it back up and running with all my old files so im trying to find out whats wrong with the 500gb HDD. That being said so far I have found out nearly nothing. Some information that my help: 1. I did not hear any ticking noises before it stopped working. (2.) Windows will recognize it in an external enclosure but tells me it must be reformatted but when i try to boot to it (Both when installed internally and externally via enclosure) it never boots up although sometimes it says windows is loading files and but then it just keeps going in a boot loop like normal never showing any images or logos. (3.) When it stopped working i got the BSOD and restarted the copmuter and it said something like Hard Drive Does Not Exist. (4.) This is my # 1 guess: When i looked at the PCB it looks like there are some signs of burning at some solder points. My question is do these burn marks ( i will try to take good pictures of them) mean i need a new PCB. If so I could use some help finding it i have found 1 website that sells it hddsupplier.com however they do not have any in stock. For anyone worried they may speak a foreign language when replying, I am somewhat farmiliar with circuit boards, I took Digital Electronics last year (sophmore year in highschool) I did quite good in class and passed the college test to earn college credits but i do understand that is barely the tip of the iceburge in this field.

The PCB in Question is: (well atleast this is what the sticker on the PCB says)
100535602 H

In The provided pictures of the PCB in question note the clear discoloration at some of the solder points. Sorry for the lack of quality i used what i had on hand at the time (My phone ).
Thank you in advance to anyone reading and or responding.

As you say that windows is recognising the drive & not clicking but is asking for it to be formatted then the pcb should be ok.
Connect the drive directly to the laptop not a USB caddy as usb does not support at a commands. Once connected check in bios does it show the correct model & size? You can use mhdd boot cd & check that the hdd dsc & drdy are high lighted to confirm that the drive initialises. If there is not physical issues with the hdd then you could could also run rstudio demo & see if that can recover your files. Ideally you should image the drive to another known good drive & then recover data from the image.
Mhdd scan can also show you how many bad sectors you have etc.

You also mention that when you try to boot to the hdd it boot loops. Are you trying to repair the os or recover your data?


Remember that if you decide to try & fix it yourself then you accept the risks involved. Otherwise take it to a dr professional.

Loki

If you are comfortable with computers; grab a copy of MHDD (set it up however you want, you can get info on that in the software portion of the forums)

scan the drive using mhdd (do not use remapping.) you shouldn't have to run it long, let it run for maybe 10-20million sectors (if this is even possible) IF you start getting a lot of delays and red X right away. just power the drive off, and it needs pro work.

IF it is able to scan 10-20 mil without issues, the heads are likely good, and the issue is elsewhere (not 100% necessarily, but very likely)


at this point you SHOULD make a clone of the drive. If that is not possible, you can try to pull directly from the drive, but I will warn you that this is still very risky.

Using mhdd, run the "switchmbr" command, if this is able to see a valid windows boot sig, it will prompt you if you would like to remove it, you want to do this, this will prevent windows from making access attempts on the disk when it is plugged it. It will also cause the disk to act as though it has no partition, etc if you were to go into disk management. It is critical that you do not format the drive, or anything like that.

At this point launch either GDB:NTFS or R-studio, run a scan, get you data. There is some more advanced stuff you can do, like try to actually repair the disk using hex, but that is advanced level stuff.

Anyways, be wary of these 5400.6 drives, there are NOT FUN to have to do mechanical work on, the swap is easy once you are seasoned, but there are some extra issues to worry about.

Thanks for the quick responses ill give it a try usually im really good with computers but I never really put any thought into hard drives but now I see how complex and important they are im going to put some serious time into them. So i remembered a few key details I have tried installing the hard drive a couple times to no success at all other than to see a loading bar and it said something like windows is loading im no 100% sure but it definitely said windows im not sure what that means but it wasnt the normal boot sequence it was like it was entering saffe mode and there is a whitish gray loading bar with a black background image. Also i ran a test on the drive using a function built in to the bios on my HP dv6-3040us witch the drive originated (OEM). the test did not finnish it came up with an error i will try that then get a copy of that program your telling me about and also give that a try and ill get back to you on that. Also to answer your question my only objective is to recover the lost data i have no problem losing the physical drive or the windows installation although it would be nice to clone the drive well that may not be the correct term. To keep it simple it would be great to restore the computer to the way it was with all the same programs and setting and of course with all of my files most importantly.
Also you dont think that the discoloration on the the PCB solder points has any importance. I was thinking that if an individual component on the board got fried then something like this might happen. and if you could just tell me a few things about this software like exaactly what i need to do when I go to use it and what i should be specifically looking for.
This may be completely irrevelevant but you said something about usb not supporting ata commands my laptop has esata ports should i get an esata capable enclosure if i want to image it to a good drive or do i need to do that with special equipment like a cloning station or something.

PCB is fine.

All suggestions posted are good.

Bad news is that these drives are notorious for severe media damage. If whatever you try does not yield in good results without much stress, do not abuse the drive as it will fail completely before you know it.

Best wishes.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Discolouration is an issue that affects Seagate and WD HDDs. It is due to oxidisation which is a consequence of materials changes mandated by RoHS.

It probably won't make any difference, but you could use a soft white pencil eraser to shine up the preamp connection pads on the component side of the PCB.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

yeah the oxidation rarely seems to affect drive performance, although every once in (very rarely) you may find a drive that is actually not functioning only due to this.