Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[elias k]

Hello everyone,

i have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1tb drive which stopped being detected by bios at some point.

The drive spins up, i hear the normal head initializing sound and then..nothing. The drive is not detected by bios at all. I put it in an external sata case, same thing.

Thinking that it may be the pcb at fault, i ordered a new pcb with same fw revision etc. I installed it and the drive was detected in bios, but i made clicking sound, like it didn't know where to read data from, and after a while it stopped.

Searching around i found about eeprom swapping, so i did that -i have an smd rework station. Result was as if i had the original pcb on, drive spinning up but not detected.

I swapped back the eeproms and am now in step one again..

Now, i am not a hard drive expert, but from what i can understand is:

-Either the original eeprom was damaged when the drive failed

-The preamp is off 

-Or it has a similar problem with the 7200.11 i read in other threads.

I want to recover the data, however i do not want to send it to recovery company.

Any ideas? Anything else to check/try?...

Thanks in advance

Elias K 

[fzabkar]

The EEPROM is OK. If it were faulty, then it would have failed the checksum test during the drive's POST, in which case the MCU would have halted without spinning up the motor.

AIUI, the 7200.12 models are afflicted with the same 0 LBA problems as the 7200.11 models, but your problem appears to be a different one. FWIW, I have seen claims by several data recovery professionals at HDD Guru that the same 0 LBA fix works for the 7200.12 series. I'd be extremely cautious, though, especially if the drive has a bad head. At the very least you may be able to get a useful serial terminal report from the drive.

[TheGateNo1]

The only option is: buy exact the same hdd and swap the heads, the pre-amp would be switched at the same time.

There are some very good Data-Recovery Tools out there also for Linux and FREE

[TheKicKer]

Elias, If you do get an answer on how to recover please drop me a private message for I also posted yesterday with someone helpin to copy the data (since HDD is seen from BIOS but not from Windows nor an external enclosure connection); all we need is to copy the stuff from DOS mode - For some strange reason I didn't get help till now

Cheers,

Roger

[elias k]

thanks fzabkar,

i'll try to get some serial data (just info) out of it, maybe it will help.

other than that, i will wait until some more "official" fix comes out for this series of drives (if it's indeed the same problem like 7200.11) 

If that does not prove to be the case, i'll consider buyng a head swap tool and a donor drive..that would be a bit difficult because noone at the moment is selling their large capacity drives, but i hope prices on new drives will revert to normal in 2012..

[TheKicKer]

this would be cheaper

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg-yVfD55tY

[elias k]

yeah, i saw that vid but this is supposed to work only for 7200.11(?) and i dont know if this procedure deletes all the data in the proccess..

[fzabkar]

The procedure is data safe.

[GnatGoSplat]

Any updates?  Mine seems to have the same issue.

[lucarescigno]

Just keep restarting your computer. Take the drive out for a while and try again in a few minutes/hours. My 7200.12 has the same issue; it disappears entirely from my system. Caused me quite a panic for a while, but eventually it showed back up so I quickly backed up all the data that was on it.

SeaTools gives a full pass even after updating the firmware so I doubt it's any mechanical failing of your drive. Most likely it's just a flawed design.