Samsung Hard Drive 'BSY' Problem?

[mrselfdestruct]

Hi Guys,

I've read countless posts about the amount of people having problems with certain Seagate Drives not being detected

by the BIOS and firmware problems related to the drives.

I feel i have fallen victim to the same issue, accept i am not a Seagate owner, rather a Samsung one.

Last week i was using my computer as normal, no issues at all, shutdown for the night.

Started up next morning - System hangs at P.O.S.T.

Reboot - Same thing

Checked the BIOS for any problems.

Uh-oh...Whats this? "No Hard Drive Detected" - not good.

Unplugged all the cables. swapped them over, you name it. No go. Same thing every time, Hangs at POST 'No Hard Drive Detected'

Chucked in a spare WD drive so i could at least install Windows and do a bit of research to hopefully get my drive working again.

The Drive still spins up, and makes the high pitched Power On noise. The hard drive activity light stays on constantly.

I've even gone as far as sticking in the freezer for 24hours to no avail.

At this point i should probably mention the specific drive details:

SAMSUNG 750GB HD753LJ

If anyone could chip in there 2 cents it would greatly appreciated

Thanks Guys

[pointertovoid]

Samsung's diagnostic program is called Shdiag.exe and is available here

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd...ort_Shdiag.html

you have to provide a disquette with an Ms-Dos and paste ShDiag on it.

You may also like Seatools, from Seagate but this one accepts other brands:

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

prefer however the manufacturer's tool each time you can.

These tools should be considered as the reference to decide if a disk is healthy or not.

By the way, they don't need a running OS. And you can often choose between a diskette and a Cdrom version.

Also the "Ultimate Boot Disk" (UBD) which is a bootable Cd that includes nearly all disk testing sofware, but not as quick and must be learnt.

I've had several worries with signal and power cables on disks recently, so changing yours may be worth a trial.

[mrselfdestruct]

Thanks for the reply mate

Unfortunately those diagnostic tools won't work due to the Hard Drive not being able to be detected.

I just tried running that Samsung Tool but it found no Hard Drives connected.

The Hard Drive LED just constantly stays on, and the P.O.S.T screen lags for about 10 seconds during start up like it's having some communication problem.

If in fact this was a case of the Hard Drive being stuck in a 'Busy' mode. Would i be able to Unlock it again using the Seagate fix? or is that only unique to Seagate Drives?

[pointertovoid]

Until the disk is detected, you won't be able to do anything with it.

You may try another cable, another port, another controller or computer, reduce controller speed to Sata-150 by the Bios, but if the disk doesn't respond: adios, bye-bye.

Did you try the same port with an other disk? Seatools detail their diagnostic, giving a separate result for the data transmission.

Then, if you have important unbacked data on the platters, you may try to take the printed circuit board of another HDD of exactly the same model and put it on your platters, it sometimes works. There are also specialized (and not very cheap) companies who recover data from out-of-order disks.

[mrselfdestruct]

I've tried different SATA Cables, Different Power Cables even different computers, but no detection.

Forcing SATA 1.5 mode is also impossible since on this drive it requires you to use Samsungs software to force it instead of jumpers.

My other Hard Drives all work perfectly on all the internal SATA Ports and detect just fine.

There's Gigs of data i need back of this drive, so not about to give up just yet.

I was going to purchase another identical drive and try replacing the Logic board. But then again that's not a guarantee.

As for data recovery services there far to expensive at the moment to consider.

What I'm really getting at is would i be able to use HyperTerminal to unlock the Drive from a 'BUSY' State like on Seagate Drives or not? Because if that is in fact the cause, then it's a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a new drive and switching board over.

The Samsung Drive has 4 Pins which i assume are similar to the ones on Seagate Drives for TX/RX ?

If they are, Would i be able to use the fix?

[mrselfdestruct]

I've reached the point of now having to buy an identical drive off ebay and try and replace the logic boards. But before i do can ANYONE tell me if it is possible to resurrect this drive through HyperTerminal like the Seagate drives?