dznuk90

Thanks for the quick reply! Really didn't expect it, much appreciated. Not sure which one is which, but think the motor is the slightly diagonal contact - I didn't insulate this one, but insulated the other one with a card (and then pulled it out before entering the U command). Only removed the PCB at the very beginning to get the card underneath, then lightly screwed it back, before fully tightening it after I pulled the card out. I've tried using a small bit of nail polish remover on both the head and the motor contacts to clean it - and lightly scratching off what appeared to be scorch marks to bring back the shine. SATA cable is quite new too so doubt it can be this, but will try a new one tomorrow. I have a live Ubuntu USB stick so will boot from that tomorrow at the same time with the new cable. How to I make an image of the \\.\PhysicalDrive? BTW I just tried again and now its in the Windows 10 'scanning and repairing' screen. Might be because I manually hard shut down the computer from the last report, or might be its detected the drive - its scanning and repairing drive F right now and last time when I first thought I fixed it, it was assigned drive letter F before the error came up. Fingers crossed maybe?

Hi everyone, thanks for all the valuable information here - highly useful. I followed the steps all the way through and got the below message: 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 Note that 'Elapsed time 0 mins and 00 secs', unlike like the one that everyone else got that says 'Elapsed time 0 mins and 05 secs' I am also missing this line (the line that is supposed to be in between the two above: User Partition Format 10% complete, Zone 00, Pass 00, LBA 00004339, ErrCode 00000080, Elapsed Time 0 mins 05 secs Now the first time I completed the process and restarted the PC with the SATA cable connected to the affect HDD (which does not have an OS installed), my bios automatically went into a screen after initial boot up that was similar to it checking and repairing a drive - this took around 10mins. I then logged into windows and my drive was there! I was so excited that I tried to see if all my files were still available. I must have clicked on files too quickly and an error popped up and then the HDD disappeared from windows - unfortunately I was not sharp enough to get a screen print of the message. Since then I've been going through the entire process again and again. Sometimes it my bios detects it with the correct size, but most of the time it doesn't detect it. Even when the bios does detect it, windows doesn't after I logged in. I've also noticed that so far every time it's appeared detected by my bios, its because I done the following: 1) completed BSY solution 2) disconnect hdd, turn off hdd power, turn off pc 3) turn on pc, log into windows (no drive detected) 4) restart pc, go into BIOS and the drive is there! And then when I log back into windows its gone again... please help me!!!