I restarted my computer this afternoon and now my BIOS does not detect my hard drive.

- There are no unusual clicking noises emitting from the hard drive (in fact it is still relatively quiet)
- I tried switching SATA/power cables at the motherboard end and the HDD end but neither helped
- I CAN hear the hard drive starting up and spinning when i turn the computer on
- The BIOS takes longer than usual to start up (probably due to it trying to detect the faulty HDD)
- My other hard drive (also seagate) works fine

Unfortunately, I never got around to backing up my data. I am willing to spend anywhere from $500-1,000 to recover this data but I need to know if it's feasible to do so within this budget? I am a student and cannot afford too much, but there is some important school related files as well as sentimental data on this hard drive.

Thanks in advance for your opinion and advice!

No user option, sorry. SA failure. Send to a pro.

It may be possible, but you need to find someone who is willing to work within your budget and has experience and equipment repairing SA on 7200.11. That is a relatively new series on which not many people are qualified so far because Seagate completely changed the drive's internal operating system for this series. In so doing it made most of our tools obsolete, so it's back to manual mode of operations for experts. Guess what that does with regards to budget requirements.

If you ever e-mailed those files with Gmail and such, check your "Sent" box.

I realize how it sounds, but that's the truth. Doomer from this forum would be able to help you, but I don't know what he charges.

PM me... I could help

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

Thanks for the information. Just out of curiosity, what does "SA" stand for?
Thanks.

System Area, a place where firmware lays, the negative sectors.

what are the chances of recovery with this kind of problem?

you have a very good chance of recovery, i would say 95%

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www.datarecoveryne.com

thank you very much for the infomation. I sent it to a DR company for a quote and they said ~1500 and it would take several weeks because they'd have to order parts.. is this out of the norm?

Order WHAT parts?? A new SA?

i didn't ask, although i don't see what else it would be? they said that the failure was due to "bad firmware" which i assume is refering to the SA

There's no parts needed to be ordered if it is SA problem. maybe your DR company you sent it out to only know board swapping, therefore "it takes weeks to hunt down the identical parts."

use mhdd or something for further diagnosis.

probably it shows up as LBA: 0

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

If they only know pcb change, then their only tools are torx screwdrivers? Amazing. So the drive will come back as 'unrecoverable' ...

lol. If only it was this easy for all SA faults

We all have guessed a problem, but exact diagnostics is still to be done.
If that DR company will fix a problem, that is all whats needed.

It would be nice if one of us would get that work.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

Well the DR company flaked out on me, are there any companies out there that are equipped to work with these drives, or even anyone on these forums with a good reputation? Thank you.

where are you located?

sounds to me it could be your firmware on the drive itself corrupted
im seeing a lot of seagate have this problem now

What do you mean by that?

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www.datarecoveryne.com