I have just sent a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drive using parcel service across Europe, and it was well wrapped in, really well, but when I tried to turn it on, it was broken.

Here are the symptoms:
- BIOS recognizes the drive, even Windows recognizes the drive, but Windows just sees the drive only as 32 mb big.
- Partition table seems to be gone, Windows sees only a 32 mb partition (32 MB RAW).
- GetDataBack could find the good partition table, but cannot read anything. Says: 4 Cylinders * 255 Head * 63 Sectors
- GetDataBack says: Warning: I/O Error 'Unknown error (65284) reading sector 65134' and 65135, 65136 etc on.
- I could get a Save Image using DiskExplorer from the first 32 mb, but starting from line 65 (in hex view), it only contains 0-s.
- I do not hear any special noises from the drive.

What can I do now? Could you recommend me any softwares or Linux LiveCD-s which could see beyound 32 mb?

For my latest chance, I have a totally identical drive (with different FW), can I try to swap the electronics? I havn't done that before, are there any risks involved?

Hello,

From this information, i think this drive have SA problems.
(Firmware part in the platter, not in PCB.)

I think you can get more information using MHDD, but if i am right, you will need professional help.

Regards,
Janos

I agree with NC but if you cant afford pro recovery you could look into hot swapping the pcb with your known-good drive. This involves getting the good drive to mount with mhdd, waiting for it to spin down and then swapping the pcb (still plugged in) to the bad drive. The result is a drive that has mounted with mismapped G-list and P-lists. There can be various complications, it surly carries some risk, but it might be worth looking into. Check out Advanced Hard Drive Data Recovery on youtube. This series is very informative and covers a PCB hot swap.

Good luck, cheers!

I don't know why, but IIRC there was at least one person in Seagate's forums who had at least partial success using the SET MAX ADDRESS command in SeaTools for DOS. I would have thought that the above command applied only to those cases involving a user defined HPA, not a hardware/firmware malfunction. <shrug>

The following articles may be helpful:

Inside the firmware (Author: Aimtrading):

newbie-info-from-and-for-newbies-about-firmware-etc-t6562.html

Wikipedia explanation of HPA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Protected_Area

Seagate's SeaTools diagnostic:

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

Other utilities include HDAT2 and MHDD.

I know it's been a long time ago, but it might help if I post how I've solved it:
1. running Seagate utility and setting the drive capacity to something (like 20 GB).
2. Power off - Power on.
3. Seagate utility set capacity to MAX.
4. Power off - Power on.

It's been running fine since.

Check HPA in MHDD.

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data recovery Poland

This FAQ may explain the drive's behaviour.

Q6: Host Protected Area (HPA) vs. 28/48-bit LBA mode:
http://www.hdat2.com/hdat2_faq.html#q6

A6: There is a problem of incompatibility on some hard drives (e.g. Seagate and/or in an external Maxtor One Touch) when you are using 48-bit command for removing Host Protected Area (HPA) created with 28-bit command.
48-bit command cannot remove HPA created with 28-bit command and vice-versa.

The solution provided in the FAQ is similar to your own.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.