I have a Seagate 7200.12 drive that does not respond when installed. The drive spins up and I can hear brief head movement, but nothing more. The drive PCB has some suspicious traces:



Would you replace this board? What other tests should I perform before dropping money into a new board with flash imaging service?

All the images for this drive are here:

https://plus.google.com/photos/10479056 ... 3ZijhNLDbw

I look forward to your response.

PCB is more than likely fine. Typically, these guys have other issues, firmware, read-write issues, bad sectors, etc. Often combination of two or three of these things.

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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

Agree, more than likely a FW issue.

Is the drive "seen" correctly in the PC BIOS (i.e. correct model and capacity)?

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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Thank you for the quick reply.

Can it be seen in the BIOS, yes and no.

On cold boot, I can see the drive in the BIOS (it's an ST1000524AS). When I cold boot to openSUSE 12.3, it shows several attempts to initialize fail with the message "ata1: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)" Finally it stops attempting and fails the drive entirely.

If I perform a warm reboot at this point, the drive does not appear in the BIOS and the OS does not attempt (and fail) to access the drive. I can only get the drive to reappear with a hard power cycle.

I have tried to perform a Seagate firmware update from bootable CD. On cold boot the CD gets to the InitDisk message before hanging a very long time. (15-20 minutes seems very long when you've been rebooting the system a half-dozen times. ) The message unable to read partition table drive 00 sector 0 shows up and repeats itself indefinitely. If I warm boot, the drive again has vanished from the BIOS and the firmware update cannot find the drive.

I have a very similar experience when I attempt to boot SeaTools from CD. Eventually SeaTools always starts and reports that it cannot find a drive.

This entire time, the drive spins up find with almost no head movement. Just a tick when the drive is first powered on. (I suspect it's the drive head unparking, but I'm not an expert on this)

I would agree that this seems to be a firmware problem, but how can it be fixed if the firmware does not respond to any attempt to communicate with it? Any suggestions?

If you can obtain a diagnostic report via the drive's serial terminal port, perhaps someone may be able to offer more detailed advice.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Yes, a terminal report could be helpful.

Search this forum for details on obtaining or making a serial adaptor.

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Thank you fzabkar and pcimage. I have learned something new today. I have discovered that drives are smart enough that they allow me to TTY into them. As I haven't been working with storage hardware in any intimate details for years, I would not be surprised to discover that this capability has been around for a while. In any case, I'm geeking out right now.

As my soldering skills are pretty pathetic (D*mmit, Jim, I'm a programmer, not screw jockey!), I have ordered a cable from EBay that should do the trick for me. I expect it next week. I'll be able to post details at that time.

Again, thank you everyone. This has become quite the educational journey.