I have a Seagate ST31000528AS 1TB Barracuda 7200.12. It was on the latest CC49 firmware.

All was well, then I heard the computer beep and drive was no longer spinning, but power was still getting to the drive. I shut everything down and let it wait for a few seconds. Upon rebooting, the drive spins up just fine and sounds normal, but the controller card (VIA) has an error message about drive not detected and BIOS not loaded. I took the drive out and connected it to other computers. It is not detected by the BIOS of any computer. On one, the drive scan hangs. On 2 others (newer, AHCI mode), the drive scan just skips it.

If I let it sit for a few minutes or hours (long enough to cool off), it can be detected if I hot-swap it onto my PC that supports hot-swapping. However, it only lasts long enough to show the disk in Computer with the correct capacity and used space. I can double-click the disk to show the root folders, but nothing else. Machine hangs until the disk icon disappears from Computer. It'll go away even if I don't click on anything. If I watch the Device Manager, I can see it show up and then go away. PCB gets almost hot where the chips are, so I tried putting an ice pack under the PCB to keep it cool, but it made no difference. Hot swapping seems to be the only way to get it to show up on a computer, however briefly, because I guess it is no longer recognizable by the time BIOS scans for it.

It does seem to make some frequent noise, sounds like the normal thermal recalibration noise to me, but happens in short intervals like every few seconds. No clicking or other odd sounds.

I have heard of BSY Error or 0 LBA errors. How do I check for this if the drive is not recognizable? Would a serial diagnostic confirm/deny either of these problems? Is 7200.12 serial pinout same as the 7200.11?

IMHO ,
i think its bad sectors causing this .Better to connect this to a dedicated system and do the cloning first i am sure its still can be cloned as you said sometimes when to connect it to a hot swap sata port it works briefly

_________________
Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

I'm afraid I don't have any dedicated cloning system as I'm just an end user. Unfortunately, when I connect it via hot swap, it only works for about 1-2 seconds. Not even long enough to get deeper than the root folder.

Well,
Stop doing this again and again .Make a system and connect this and another same capacity drive to this and use any good dos based cloning software and do reverse cloning on this one

_________________
Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

Ah, okay, I guess I misunderstood. I thought you were talking about connecting it to some kind of specialized hardware because none of my computers can see the drive. Is there a program that can access the drive even if BIOS doesn't recognize it? MHDD can't see it, and I tried DOS Ghost, it can't see the drive either.

I did try it on a PC with HDD LED, and the LED is always lit. It doesn't turn off or even flicker. That makes me wonder if there is any way to check for the BSY error.

Also, I think I was wrong about the sound it makes. It doesn't really sound like thermal recalibration sound, it sounds like disk access, similar to the sounds a good drive makes periodically when windows is idle.

Is the data important?

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Not important enough to be worth spending much money, but important enough to be worth a couple weeks of my free time if a DIY recovery is even possible.

I have a USB-to-TTL adapter I use for various projects, so I just hooked it up tonight. I guess the drive is toast? This is what I get:



I hit CTRL-Z, and this is what I get:



I don't know anything useful to type there, so I tried putting the drive in Online Mode, and this is what happened:



It's been doing that for awhile now, and I think the list is growing. Looks like my problem must be caused by bad sectors then?
Any hope, or does that sound hopeless?

Well,
i told you simple enough if you were in india and i had your drive

_________________
Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

Thanks for the offer, but India is a bit far away by many thousands of miles. What would normally be the solution to recover data from a drive in this state? No DOS or Windows based utility I've found can even see the drive.

Try Linus base DDRescue this one might help out but no guarantees on this one your drive has a lot of problems. I would think that a clone of this done by a professional shop should not cost to much to do this one. Call around and ask a few questions as to how much a shop would charge you to clone this drive to another one for you if you bring in the other drive/

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Iorana Haraharaini

... but he has FIRST to make the drive recognised. In this state it won't come ready nor seen by PC !

Solution : send to a pro for proper SAFE diagnose (may or may not be "simple" problem in this case) and solution - with proper gear it would be easy to SAFELY diagnose and fix. Other DIY experiment can kill the drive (or kill / garble data) - better safe than sorry.



1 Million $ question without the million $...

So general consensus is this drive is not repairable by any DIY means, so unless I want to pay for professional recovery services, I should just give up on it. Correct?

I was at least disciplined enough to back up all my irreplaceable photos so I'm not too worked up about the content of the drive. I'd just hoped to save it because it's hundreds of GBs of stuff my wife and I have accumulated over the years, but nothing we can't re-acquire, it'll just take a really long time, assuming we can even remember what we had.

if you you use pc3k UDMA easy to repair it !!!

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to carry and to save firmware seagate

If HE (they, for others) had Pc3k UDMA and knew how to use it, this thread would have not started...