Hello Everyone,

I have two Seagate Barrcuda 7200.10 250Gb drives. Both have been working fine for 5/6 years until yesterday.

My second drive ("data") was preventing the pc from powering up. I discovered this after disconnecting power from every device in turn until my PC actually started.

A bit of side-by-side multimeter testing on the two PCBs showed that there was definitely a short on the bad drive somewhere. I put the PCB from the good drive onto the other one and this time the pc powered up and went into startup! Yay! The drive was now spinning.

BUT: the drive is not recognised by any OS. Further investigation shows that the BIOS is not recognising it either.

I was hoping that the well documented 7200.11 BSY fix (https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/) would help but further reading on this forum suggests it's only for the 7200.11 and not the 7200.10.

I really, REALLY need the data on that drive but don't want to pay huge money to a data recovery company.

Next step is to try some sort of SMART diagnostic (like http://www.hdsentinel.com/) but I have no experience with these.

I'm not a hardware expert but am fairly adept at minor home electonics (soldering and the like). I am a programmer too (by profession) so I not afraid of using HyperTeminal or hooking up a RS232 to the drive to see if I can get any info from it. I just don't know what to look for or if it is even worth my while trying.

Any help would be appreciated.

Ok. So I got it working again by cutting out the TVS diode on the busted PCB. All data is intact and system works fine. You can read more on how I did this (including pictures) on this blog post: http://prosperostuff.blogspot.co.uk/201 ... amity.html