Seagate 1TB ST31000524AS (7200.12)
Firmware: Jc4b

My hard disk was slow for a couple of days, I thought it was problem with RAM, then after a restart HDD was not recognised in BIOS, it spins and there is no clicking sound from it, I changed the SATA cable and when I tried it in my friend's PC once or twice it showed up in BIOS but then it was stuck when mobo tried to boot.
I have family pics of 4 years in it that I don't have backup of(Huge mistake in my part).
Please let me know what I have to do.

Hello and greetings !

First of all, do not panick. I know how important the data inside the drive is for you, but at this point by what you had written there is nothing that points out that the data can't be recovered.

If you treasure your data you should consider to take the drive to a specialized data recovery business, and you shouldn't attempt to power on the drive further, to avoid more damage.

The problem with the drive might be something simple like a failing head or a partial access problem due to a damaged translator or bad sectors.

With very expensive and specialized tools (hardware and software) owned by a reputable data recovery professional near your residence, the relocation of bad sectors and the surface scan for bad sectors can be stoped, the translator sub system can be fixed and the data can be extracted by the process of cloning your damaged drive to another one.

There is a high chance that with the help of those expensive tools the data can be retrived without the need of a head swap, so it might not be a very expensive recovery yet.

If you decide that the data is not so important to justify paying for it to be safely recovered and you decide to try something by your own, you might want to check with mhdd if it can detect the drive (conected directly by sata) and if it picks the drive with the correct capacity, as well as if it's possible to scan it by Logic Block Address.
If you that does work you might attempt to clone the drive yourself with linux freeware or comercial tools.
If that doesn't work you might need at least a cheap ttl adaptor to further check the status of the drive, but take note of this, DO NOT, and i repeat, DO NOT apply the 7200.11 fix that is mentioned all over the web on your 7200.12 drive, as this will cause further damage to the translator sub system and will increase your bill if you decide later to have the drive serviced by a professional.

Hello, Thank you for the reply and yes I have been researching about it and all I can see is 7200.11 fix, thank god I came here and saw posts not to use it.
Please tell me whether this is the one http://www.ebay.in/itm/USB-To-RS232-TTL ... 258ea68c3c and also let me know what I should and shouldn't do.

wrong topic!