Hi,

I'm looking for some advice on a Seagate drive outside of transferring the platters to a donor drive.

This drive had been dropped by the customer and had a stuck motor. We unstuck the motor by turning it until free.

After freeing the motor the drive was not showing a capacity in bios or in PC-3000 Express. A backup of the service area showed that both copy 0 and 1 of the translator were corrupt. After running the Solution for the Translation violation (0 GB), the drive reported its full capacity in PC-300 and in bios. At this point, the drive continuously clicks. When attached to on-board sata in a desktop computer, the drives provides a NTFS partition with files that can be accessed and very slowly transferred to the desktops internal hard drive. The drive continuously clicks while slowly transferring data. The extracted data seems to be ok.

Data transfer is very slow and at times stops transferring completely without warning.

After attempting to transfer data, at times, the drive will spin up, click and squeaks a few times, then spin down again. Data is not accessible after spinning down. Allowing the drive to cool down for an hour restores access to the partition and data, the drive still continuously clicks while slowly transferring data.

Buy Data Extractor.

Agreed
With DE you shall be able to image the disk

+1 for DE.

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RAID/Server Recovery

Would Data Extractor clone at a faster speed than 43GB in a week? Unfortunately, the drive motor has seized once again. Does anyone know the root cause of the problem is inside the motor, I mean, can the motor bearings be lubricated?

1. Forcing seized motors rarely works. I know, I've tried.
2. +1 for DE. Anything else is crap in my opinion.
3. I hope you checked the heads for damage before turning on a dropped drive.
4. Send it to someone that can handle this type of work before your customer loses their data forever.
5. Lubricating the bearings doesn't work. I know, I've tried.
6. Purchase better tools if you want to do DR.

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Lubricating the bearings is not advisable at all and won't help.
As all the HDDs produced in the last decade or so use a Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB), with an oil-filled gap of ~2 µm between the rotating shaft and stationary sleeve.