I'm going to make an apology right from the git go: I'm a newbie and I'm pretty sure some of the things I've done (with the best of intentions) are going to make your toes curl. I panicked and put my faith (and data) in Googles hands so I beg forgiveness for some of the undoubted sins I have commited!

What I stand to lose here is years of song projects, remixes, multitracks and acapellas, masters and other irreplacable audio I have written, produced or collected and that is irreplaceable to me.

The drive
Seagate Baracuda 7200.11 500gb
S/N 5QM0C2GH
ST3500820AS
Firmware SD45
pcb100466725 reva

This drive was housed in an external case branded Medion HDDrive 2 GO which has both USB and STA ports on it.

What happened

The Seagate had been sat on top of my main PC for a long time. As my music PC had died I bought a 2nd hand dual quad Xeon system specifically for my music projects. When it showed up it had a relatively small 250gb system drive so I figured I could remove the Seagte 500gb drive I already had from it's external case and fit it internally to the dual Quad machine (a Dell Precision T5400)

I removed the drive from the case and fitted it into the Dell (SATA 0, system drive was on SATA 1). When I booted the Dell somethign weird happened as the main case fan which pulls over the hard drives went into overdrive. I shut the machine down rebooted and the seagte drive wasn't showing. I went into bios and realised it SATA 1 wasn't turned "on" so I enabled it and then rebooted. During boot the machine hung.

I pulled the drive and put it back in the external case and tried to connect it via usb but the install hardware failed with warning message that the usb device wasn't working properly.

What I'v done since

With just power I couldn't feel the drive spinning up or any activity at all. This is where I googled (sorry) and I'm sure you can guess that the subject of freezing dead drives came up (I told you your toes would curl). Yes, I did - in a bag for 40 minutes. Needless to say it remained dead after freezing.

I then read about dead pcb symptoms and this sounded plausible to me so I bought another second hand 500gb 7200.11 Barracuda and swapped the pcb out. Now when powered up in the external housing the drive is spinning up but it is clicking for maybe a minute initially until it stops.

Via USB Windows recognises the hardware as Medion HDDrive 2 Go and device manager reports it's working proeply but when you try to pull back the drive details it just comes back blank/can't be recognised. When connected to SATA and attemptingto boot the machine it gets stuck part way through bios when attempting to ID the drive.

The PCB donor drive
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500gb
ST3500620AS
Firmware SD25
pcb 100466725 reva

And that's where I'm at. the data is very valuable to me. From searching the forum I can now see that there may be an issue with the difference in firmware causing the issue, or alternatively the heads may be damaged. To behonest some of the threads I've been trying to read are quite bewildering! Certainly some of the images of opening up the drive are pretty scary - not sure I would want to get into that level of technicality but I am willing to listen to any advice anyone would be kind enough to offer or suggest someone in the UK who could help/specialises in recovery as I'm worried this may be beyond me.

Whatever the case I certainly appreciate you taking the time to read my rambling and proabably misgided attempts at resolving my problem. Sorry, should have said hello first! Cheers Scott

The PCBs on these are not directly interchangeable and if you swap the PCB then you MUST swap the ROM chip too.

Firstly, check the TVS diodes (search this forum for info on that)

Or send it to me (I'm in Peterborough) and I'll check it out properly for you!

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

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

I would vote for sending it to pcimage. I have a Music hard disk as well with similar contents. The first step in a DIY hard disk repair should be the statement:

"As the data on the disk is not important, I understand I may lose the lot and I am ok with that."

What you have described doesn't include clicking noises or horrible scraping noises, so that is a good sign.

Thanks for fast reply. I searched forum for TVS diodes and found some example images - looks kinda fiddly.

Sooo....what would I need to send you? Whole drive or just PCB or both PCBs? Don't want to contravene any forum rules so message me if that's better. Thanks again for your reply.

You have PM

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

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

Thanks - can't send pms so have emailed.

A board swap and firmware transfer should cost you no more than US$50.

http://search.store.yahoo.net/yhst-4446 ... ion.com%2F
http://search.store.yahoo.net/yhst-1443 ... rts.com%2F

This is the chip that needs to be swapped:
http://ep.yimg.com/ay/yhst-144375849714 ... 1152-4.gif

For information on TVS diodes, see http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diode_FAQ.html.

The two TVS diodes are in the top right corner of the abovementioned photo. If you are lucky, then all you will need to do will be to snip the shorted diode.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.