I have a 500GB seagate sata drive that will not ID on the computer, or be recognized at all in either windows or linux. I would like to possibly try getting an image of this drive using MHDD or any other tool that somone could suggest to me? The drive spins up and everything but just won't be recognized by the computer.

Any help would be greatly aprechiated. Thanks a lot.

Not going to happen. If the operating system doesn't even see your drive then there's no way you can access the data through the operating system.

Is your drive a 7200.11? Probably it is suffering from the known issue with Seagate drives, in which case you will not be able to access the data at all until it is repaired.

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

U shoud check if the hDD its answering to the ATA commands to read sectors and check wich are the answers, like drccsc said if the hDD show u ABRT, at all sectors and u get LBA 0 , surely its u problem

Regards

Yes it is a 7200.11 baracuda, or however it is spelled. So do you think it is a bad controller board, firmware, or something? It's common? What is typically the case with these drives? I was just hopeing I could fix it myself without sending it to be repaired. I don't have any equipment yet or obviously not enough knowledge. I was told by the company that does my data recovery that they wrote some software that will allow them to create a sector by sector image which can recover data for 50% of drives which come in. Thanks again.

What is the best way to issue the ATA commands to the drive? What is ABRT?

This HDD is not repairable by normal means. It has firmware corruption, and needs to be handled carefully. If the data is important send it to a professional. If the drive's functionality is what you seek....RMA it. Although I don't recommend staying with Seagate drives for the time being at least. Pick up a nice Spinpoint F1 or something =)

It isn't my drive . I just was hoping I could fix it myself or at least know how to diagnose problems similar in the future. I appreciate all the replies.
Thanks

You get revenue for this?