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

[Chacan]

Hello.

I have a strange problem with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11. Original firmware: SD15, but updated.

The disk is not detected by bios, but it's visible in windows 7 disk manager and some hard disk tools.

It's visible, but it can't be initialized or accessed.

I tried the typical fix for SD15 disks problem (i repaired some other disks with this method) but nothing happends with this one.

The entire process goes well, except the final step allways says:

Max Wr Retries = 00, Max Rd Retries = 00, Max ECC T-Level = 14, Max Certify Rewrite Retries = 00C8
User Partition Format Successful - Elapsed Time 0 mins 00 secs

Trying to initialize it in disk manager, allways gives an I/O error when is connected to SATA and cyclic redundancy error when is on usb adapter.

ADITIONAL INFORMATION:

I tried to change the pcb with another disk (same model and firmware) and with his own flash memory and the problem still the same.

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance and very sorry for my poor english ^_^

[Cantbecanit]

Read up on LBA0 fault, and see if you have the same problem.

[Chacan]

Hello. Thank you for your answer, but is not LBA0 or BSY error. Or, if it is, I can't repair it via serial connection.
May be the pcb is ok but it can't read from plates for some phisical problem? The disc spins.

:/

[Cantbecanit]

As you've had it apart and played Hyperterminal with it from the looks of things it could be anything now.

One suggestioon for you though, get Seatools DOS version, burn it to a disc and boot it, in it there are ops to re-set the drive, there is also ops to change the size of the drive, so if re-setting doesn't work maybe knocking off 50GB in size may allow it to get out of bad sector territory, do a low level format while you are in there as well, hth and please let me know how it goes.

[Chacan]

Seatools for DOS freezes searching hard drives. :/

Firmware update utility freezes in the same stage.

Seatools for Windows detects the drive, but I can't do any operation on it.

When I tried Seatools for DOS or the Firmware utility the only drive connected was the bad one.

Any idea?

I don't really care about save the disk itself. I'ts the data what I would like to read...

Tank you

[Cantbecanit]

I think playing with it means you've probably killed it tbh, and if Seatools won't work with it properly and you are in IDE mode in the bios I can't really think of anything else that's going to help, it actually sounds like a drive with 4000+ bad sectors on it.

Try a recovery program if you havent already, also see what Sentinal says about it as well if you can.

Ignore the trying to reduce drive size thing I suggested earlier, I had a play with one of my mortally wounded drives and it doesn't help.

[Chacan]

Ok.

Thank you very much for your time.

I tried some recovery and test programs, some for DOS, some for Windows, some detected the drive, some not.. but after that, noone shows information about the drive. No SMART data, no nothing.. :/

I still trying things if I found some new and I will inform if I found something interesting.

Thank you very much again.

David.