I have a Barracuda 7200.12 hard drive (model # ST31000528AS) running firmware CC37 that has failed in my desktop. The computer had been running unattended for a few days and then had a blue screen. When I restarted, it was unable to boot. I took out the HD and connected it in a host computer as a secondary HD. The drive spins with no unusual noises and Windows recognizes the drive and assigns a drive letter, but is unable to read it. Windows Explorer gives an error that the drive is not accessible. I've tried HD Tune and a few different data recovery programs, each with the same results: they see the drive but either freeze up or time out when trying to read it.

Does this sound like a logical or physical failure? Does anyone have any advice for DIY recovery beyond what I've already tried? My next step would be to take it to Staples to have them try to recover the data.

It's neither logical or physical. Likely firmware and maybe logical.

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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

Thanks labtech. Could you elaborate? How would I go about fixing this without losing the drive's data?

Read on Seagate firmware here on the forum.
You will need a terminal connection to be able to determine what it is going with the drive. Sometimes, a determination is not 100% accurate in this manner, but it helps in understanding the drive's behavior a bit more.

Whatever you do, be careful what you on the terminal as there are certain dangerous things that people easily go for and render the data unrecoverable. So, careful what commands you send. Needless to say, no commands are needed in order to get a terminal output.

P.S. You may want to entertain practicing on a different drive to get a sense of how things work.

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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