brickgate

@jaclaz: I agree. Question is what can I do, not what is likely... Re padawan and the force ... Not quite at 'blindfolded' yet, but I made many things from scratch myself, custom computers included (my own custom PCBs, chips and other components) ... hence not having trouble with the soldering iron.

@jaclaz: Thanks! My original assumption was that the disk was dying. It did not entirely match BSY state as it was working somewhat - in other respects it did. LBA0 symptoms did not show up until I swapped the the PCBs. I was very reluctant to do so but, when presented what does indeed appear to be dying electronics with data still in there, I had very little else to try. I probably should have posted a question on this forum first, but I had assumed that, because it is a very old drive (and those posts were old too) that there would be nothing there... I am interested in recovering the data obviously, but it is not the end of the world. All my other drives were mirrors + NAS + CD/DVD/BR backups. What I have on this one is some Minecraft worlds my kids created, for example, some scanned images possibly, downloaded media and FEW fresh documents for which I do have some older backups (I did get some of those out). I am fine with very technical explanations, soldering irons and schematic diagrams... as long as I can see them

Long story short - I have a "1TB" (1000 Gbytes) Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (ST31000340AS) that I can't access and I need help recovering darta. I have Googled this around and found the following posts that seem to be useful but link to content that is no longer available: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/ http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/143880-seagate-barracuda-720011-read-me-first/ http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/133387-debricking-the-seagate-drives/ I may try to imply the details if I have t but, if any of you can help, I would appreciate that very much. Details: Drive details: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1000 Gbytes S/N: 9QJOQKB3 ST31000340AS P/N: 9BX158-303 Firmware: SD15 Date Cide: 08456 WWN: 5000C5000CCFA291 Product of Thailand Label on the PCB says: 100468979 H 7840Y1DL Original symptom was that the OS (Windows 7) would start booting up from this drive but would stop some time later. Was never able to find which driver it was loading when it stopped, only the driver loaded before, and that is not relevant. I tried connecting the drive to my notebook using CablesToGo USB-to-SATA adapter but it refused to show up (other drives worked), yet it continued to partially boot the OS in its "home" computer. I was able to boot Linux based recovery tools from a DVD. It would see the hard drive and I was able to access and copy some files from it and copy them to other hard drives I have... but this would only work for a few minutes. Then all access to the drive would stop and I would have to turn the system off, then on and I would have another few minutes of access. Not sure if this was related to time, heat, accessed area of disc or anything else but it was so. I, unfortunately, had another accident and I had lost the copies I made too. For that reason I have replaced the motherboard (well, the entire computer really short of the case and drives). The new one could not see the drive at all (didn't try the Linux tools yet). I bought a used re-certified drive of same specs (another one of those, just different serial number and firmware) and swapped the electronics. Details on that one are (differences highlighted in red): Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1000 Gbytes S/N: 9QJ2GZHP ST31000340AS P/N: 9BX158-303 Firmware: SD1A Date Cide: 0918-5 Site Code: KRATSG CSO: 0944-3 WWN: 5000C5000A120A81 Product of Thailand Label on the PCB says: 100468979 J C9112YFS That was no help, but behaviour was a bit different. With the "new" electronics the drive did emit different sounds and there was clunking too. But it did not report its presence to the motherboard - was not visible. It was visible via the CablesToGo USB-to-SATA adapter, but it reported a size of 0. I just swapped the electronics back - no change, of course. I judiciously ran CMOS/BIOS setup, SeaTools and other physical disk access software to see if it is at all visible. Neither BIOS nor SeaTools reported anything with either old or new electronics on it ever. I only saw it via the USB adapter, as noted above. Please help!