sologub

Dear mates, I am due to report a bug similar to the notorious 0 LBA / BUSY occurred with my new 7200.12 series HDD last week. I have a Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500418AS, firmware revision CC37, part num 9SL142-301 which abruptly became inaccessible for OS. I do have a dual-boot-System with Ubuntu 9.10 on Barracuda and Win-XP on another HDD. I used the Barracuda as a data storage disk w logic partition formatted as ntfs to get acess from Ubuntu and Win, but sadly, with no essential data backed up. The problem is: when I run Ubuntu, suddenly my drive has gone, with no reason. At OS booting it was /dev/sda, now there is no /dev/sda anymore, but a /dev/sdc (/dev/sdb is the drive where the operating systems are). When I run Win-XP the disk erratically appears among BIOS registered devices with its full capacity, but in most boot-up attempts not. Win-XP sys logs shows numerous (up to 30-50 repeated records) I/O failures during disk paging operation (error 51) This is obviously a reaction of OS to a malfunctioned part of HDDs firmware responsible for translation of HDD sectors physical addresses to the system LBA. Though Win-XP device manager indicates ST3500418AS device as working correctly, file explorer shows the logic disk as inaccessible media , does not suggest to format it and hangs up when I attempt to explore the volume. Numerous HDD scan / data rescue tools I have tried up to test disk / recover information indicated ST350041-8AS as a completely bad disk with no file system on it. Seagate seatools diagnostic program for DOS ver 2.14 recognizes the faulty disk, but short test always proceeds to just 90 percent and is never finished. So, in a hope the data on disk remains intact I am looking for feedback and problem solution. Does anybody think a replacement of PCB with the same FW revision taken off another 7200.12 ST3500418AS might solve the problem? Will the service info on the track 0 be automatically translated to the new CPU? I think, buying new HDD is at least less expensive than professional data recovery. Alexander