Spanky Deluxe

I've requested quotes from a number of companies now and have heard back from one or two. The one that you linked to that quotes £97 at the start was the first to get back to me (I literally got a phone call within minutes of completing the online form) and I was all set to go with them but having googled them, it seems that their usual actual repair costs are £500-£1000. I'd rather have an up front price so I know what I'm getting, so I'm going to wait a few days for the other quotes to come in. One thing that strikes me as crazy though is that so many of these companies charge up to £200 for data recovery that requires no physical work done on the drives. You can buy excellent recovery software for that price!

Yeah, I'm going to call it a day on my attempts to fix it, connecting to it with a converter was one thing and unlikely to cause any problems but I really don't want to lose my data so it's time to call in the professionals - something an IT 'pro' like me hates to admit! I'm not going to let my pride get in the way of data recovery though!! Do you happen to know of any good UK based data recovery folks? I'm London based but could obviously ship it further afield. No worries if not, I'll just resort to googling and getting quotes but I figured I'd ask just in case.

Thanks Jacklaz for the feedback, it's really appreciated. After reading your comments, I decided to go back and try the connector on some more drives. I took out another 1.5TB drive from my computer that I know for sure is still working and what do you know, this one did give feedback over Putty. What I find really bizarre, is that I have two 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 drives here that have failed with exactly the same symptoms and give no responses over a terminal connection and this problem doesn't seem to be the same as the 'common' ones. It just seems strange. I'm not really sure where to go from here. I know PCB switches are supposed to be bad and require you desoldering a fiddly chip but is it something even worth trying? I don't mean the soldering, I don't want to risk that but maybe just a switch to see if that gets me anywhere? The drives that have failed both have the same model numbers but they have slightly different part numbers (9JU138-002 and 9JU138-001) different firmwares (CC1H and CC1G respectively). I have at least two drives that have exactly the same part numbers and firmwares as one of them (the 002, CC1H ones). Is it worth trying a pcb switch? I know it's looking far more likely that I'm going to have to get the professionals involved but I suspect finding a recovery centre that isn't going to fleece me is going to be tricky and besides which, I only need the data off one of the drives but I have no idea which of the two that is - one is full of actual data and one is just useless junk! Edit: I think my problem is different after all. Both of my drives click 11 times on startup, which looks to be unrelated but gives similar errors (I originally searched for the weird name of the drives in the BIOS and 11 clicks and through several click throughs of google results and threads, ended up here). I'm going to try and clean the contacts tomorrow on the drive with alcohol but I'm not holding out much hope.

I was really hoping I wouldn't have to post for help but I'm having trouble with my attempts at unblocking my drive. I actually have two drives that seem to have failed with the same problem, they are detected in BIOS but only as ST_M13FQBL which I believe means they are both suffering the 0 LBA issue. In order to attempt to fix these drives, I've bought two USB->TTL devices - both from Amazon UK but I can't seem to get either to bring up the prompt. With both devices, a feedback loop works just fine. They appear to be powered internally from the USB. I have connected both up in the same manner - i.e. TX/RX wires connected to the hard drives (both ways round tried) and ground from the adapter goes to a breadboard and then goes to the ground wire on the power supply connected to the hard drive and also to the ground pin connector on the drive itself. I have been using a multimeter to check all the voltages and have noticed the following: USB->TTL (Prolific Chip): RX on adapter -> RX on drive reads 0V TX on adapter -> TX on drive reads 3.26V Temporarily removing ground to adapter gives nothing. USB->TTL (Prolific Chip reverse connection): RX on adapter -> TX on drive reads 2.61V TX on adapter -> RX on drive reads 3.4V Temporarily removing ground to adapter gives stream of gibberish. USB->TTL (Silicon Labs CP210x) RX on adapter -> RX on drive reads 3.28V TX on adapter -> TX on drive reads 3.37V Temporarily removing ground to adapter gives nothing. USB->TTL (Silicon Labs CP210x reverse connection): RX on adapter -> TX on drive reads 2.62V TX on adapter -> RX on drive reads 3.45V Temporarily removing ground to adapter gives stream of gibberish. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do? I've ordered an additional two adapters from eBay which are supposedly 'built' for Seagate Firmware fixes but those look like they're going to take a week or two to arrive. I know there have been reports of people going through four or five adapters until they get a working solution but I wanted to see if there's anything I can do with these ones. I am using Putty with 38400, 8, 1, none, none as I'm supposed to. I've tried Hyperterminal as well. I've also tried these adapters on two computers - a Windows PC running Windows 10 and now a MacBook Pro with a VMWare virtual machine running Windows 7 with the USB adapters connected directly to the VM. I have tried these connections with the Seagate drive fully intact, with a card blocking the terminal and with the board completely removed. I have also tried it on a couple of other Seagate drives I have lying around. I get the same issue every time, no prompt, no feedback from the drives at all.