Seagate 7200.11 Fixed and then stopped working

[kurgan62]

Alright.. I recently got hit by the BSY state issue on my 750GB 330AS with SD15

I ordered a CA-42 cable and performed the standard fix (with the piece of card paper and all that), it worked and I had my data back. I installed the SD1A firmware and it actually seemed to speed up the response time of the drive. I had always had an issue where Windows 7 would force a re-indexing of my images folder every time I opened it... it was a pain in the a** I don't understand what it was doing, but it was fixed.

The computer ran fine, hard drive performed great and I even copied roughly a GB of video off of it so I could watch it on my laptop.

I was out of town for 3 days and my machine was turned off. When I got back I turn it on and it posts, the BIOS sees the 330AS with the new SD1A firmware.

Windows 7 starts to load and it hangs for a solid 5 minutes on the windows logo (no good..) and when it finally boots up and I get into windows the drive isn't listed in My Computer.

I head over to computer management -> disk management and am immediately greeted by a "Disk(0) is not initialized" message, my first thought was that the MBR got corrupted (this had happened before). Please note that both the BIOS and Windows recognize the drive as having the correct 698 GB size, so this isn't LBA 0 or w/e.

None of my efforts to fix the MBR have gone anywhere. Any Microsoft/Windows function on the hard drive gives an "can not complete because of an I/O error" including trying to reset the MBR in diskpart (from recovery console).

I decided to hook the CA-42 cable up to it again and fidget with it, nothing else to lose right?

the F712 command yields:

F3 T>F712
Byte:05A1:       Expansion =
                 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
                 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
                 ''

... which is obviously not right, unless the new firmware had something to do with this?

I have no idea if this is a related incident or if the physical drive decided it was time to die. Judging by the fact that I can use the diagnostic serial interface without a problem it may be just that.

Thanks in advance if you can help

Edited October 26, 2010 by kurgan62

[kurgan62]

I re-attached the SATA cable and ran testdisk on the drive.

Partition table type (auto): Intel
Disk /dev/sdb - 750 GB / 698 GiB - ST3750330AS
Partition table type: Intel
New options :
 Dump : No
 Cylinder boundary : Yes
 Allow partial last cylinder : No
 Expert mode : No

Analyse Disk /dev/sdb - 750 GB / 698 GiB - CHS 91201 255 63
Current partition structure:

Partition: Read error