My three Seagate drives, two internal and one external, all bought in late 2012, have failed diagnostics tests in Seatools. I was able to extract most of the data from one of the internals and the external, but the other internal is proving to be quite a challenge (although luckily most of the data in it was backed up to the external). So I'm trying to figure out if spending $50 on a replacement PCB will work, or if this is a mechanical problem and spending that money would be useless.

The drive is a Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001-9YN166, firmware CC4H, board number 100664987 Rev. A. The symptoms vary; at first, the drive wasn't even recognized by the BIOS. At other times, it was recognized by the BIOS, and Windows 7 would see it, but a few minutes later it would suddenly disappear from the list of drives and nothing would see it, Disk Management, Device Manager, Windows Explorer, nothing, as it if didn't exist.

With the other two drives, when I tried to copy all the folders from the root onto a new drive, it would copy, but at one point it would stop and tell me that it couldn't read a particular file, so it gave me the option to skip that file, and when I did, it copied almost every single file, because doing a folder size comparison gives me the same size folder by folder with a few exceptions. So at the most I lost a few files.

However, in this particular drive, when it is recognized by the system and I start copying a folder to a new drive, it starts fine but shortly afterwards it stalls and I don't get any error from Windows Explorer, it just shows the transfer speed slowing down until it gets down to a few KB/sec and that's it. The disk tab in Resource Monitor at first stays completely empty for a minute, until it shows activity from the other drives, but nothing from the terminally ill drive.

When I try to copy I don't hear any excessive clanking noise coming out of the drive, but I hard one clicky noise once in the ten minutes since I started the copy.

My first course of action was to try to get a tiny torx screwdriver or bit to try to swap the PCB with the other internal drive, since both are the same model, bought a month apart, and the other drive seems to work to some extent, especially after I did a low level format with Seatools for DOS that took about a day, but after that it doesn't give me a fail when I run Seatools diagnostics on it. However, I would like to find out first if swapping the PCB would work, because I can still use that other drive for things that are non-essential, such as record TV shows in my Windows Media Center PC.

So what do the experts here think? Should I swap the PCB or spend $50 in one from hdd-parts.com, or do you think this a mechanical problem and only a specialized data recovery company would be able to extract the data?

And if it's a mechanical problem, that advice I read online about freezing the drive for a day inside a ziploc bag is absolute BS, right? I tried that once years ago and it didn't work for me at all, and I read that it might make things even worse in the case some day you can afford to send it to a recovery company.

Thanks!

I think it's highly unlikely to be a PCB related issue. Almost certainly is related to bad sectors causing the drive to hang and eventually disconnect. If you have the data you need already backed up, RMA the drive and invest the money toward a good HGST or Toshiba dive.

If you still need data off of the drive, you might try cloning it to another drive using ddrescue.
http://www.data-medics.com/forum/viewto ... f=21&t=133
This tutorial will walk you through how to do it. Just be sure to follow it closely about things like using a log file, etc.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Thanks for your reply. I don't have experience with Toshiba drives, but HGST is Western Digital, and I have had a terrible experience with a WD drive that didn't even last a year and a half and I lost a lot of data. These Seagates at least lasted almost two and a half years. I couldn't RMA them anyway, their warranty is one year.

I will try ddrescue and see what happens.

Hi I had kind of the same problem, one day my external drive just died one day, even smelt like circuit burned, it last 3 years and maybe was turned off 10 days in all the three years, when I open the housing where it comes (not the hard drive) I saw a burned circuit in the internal adapter between the drive and the USB port, so I unplugged and tried to use it in a external base, but one circuit in the PCB of the hard drive burned!

I want to know if there is any chance to test the disk without the board in order to know if the PCB was the problem or if the problem for example the motor or some internal circuit, because if it is the PCB I am able to change it and change the BIOS from one to the another, but if the problem is internal on the HDD then I just throw it away.

The drive is the Seagate 3 TB Barracuda ST3000DM001 and the PCB is the 100664987 REV A

Thanks to all