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Yep, another Seagate (ST1000DM003) brick thread - fixable?


ran

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Sooo...... two days ago, my seemingly fully functional Seagate ST1000DM003 (firmware: CC47, date: 14076) drive decided it was no longer functional.

 

Pertinent data:

1) recognized in BIOS upon bootup, but with SMART error.

2) CrystalDiskInfo cannot read SMART info

3) Windows Disk Manager recognizes the drive and wants to initialize it (uhh..no!)

4) Data recovery software (e.g. GetDataBack NTFS) recognizes the drive but cannot read (a bunch of LBA access errors)

 

A couple of years ago, my dad's HP computer died - it had one of the Seagate 7200.xx drives with the known problems.  I had created my own serial-USB connector cable from the CA-42 cable and successfully resurrected his drive (which is still working fine today).

 

Soooo.. I thought... *maybe* there would be a way to resurrect this drive, at least enough to get data off.  Let me say that I do have a mirrored NAS plus an external 2TB as redundant backups of important stuff, so while this isn't a "oh, I lost all my pictures and videos of my beautiful children for the last 10years <sniff>" story, there was stuff on here I wanted, but not super essential critical (enough adjectives for ya'? :) ).

 

I decided to pull out my CA-42 cable, pulled hyperterminal from an XP VM onto my Windows 7 machine, installed some PL2303-GPS drivers (many others didn't work) and hooked things up.

 

Current situation:

If I just plug in a SATA power connector to the drive, it does *not* automatically spinup.

If I additionally hookup the CA42 cable, open up hyperterminal (38400,8,n,1,n) and type Ctrl-z, the drive spins up.

If I type Ctrl-C (supposedly a spin down/reinitialize command), the drive spins down.

I never see a prompt in the hyperterminal window

 

That's it.  I can endlessly spin up and spin down with those commands, but I see nothing in response in the hyperterminal window.  (Loopback test using Terminal is fine) I've tried sliding in some paper to block the PCB-drive connectors (not the 3 motor connections), but that doesn't seem to do anything.

 

So, I'm curious if any of the previous gathered knowledge regarding Seagate firmware problems, LBA/BSY issues and such would be applicable in this situation.......or not. 

 

I haven't tried any of the  PCB pin shorting described on this forum as my particular drive has not been mentioned....nor do I add any external power to my CA-42 cable, just plugged into a USB port.

 

Thoughts?

 

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ran, your drive is NOT bricked (or at least it WAS NOT bricked at the time you attempted using the CA-42 cable).

 

It is NOT LBA.

It is NOT BSY.

Both BIOS and Windows "see" the device.

 

Hard disk die :(, it is a fact of life .

Some die suddenly, some start developing area(s) of "bad sectors" (what you call "a bunch of LBA access errors) and are simply "ill".

 

The illness is called "bad sectors" or "LBA access errors" (or "bad head(s)" or "bad areas") and is NOT "bricking", or it may be anything among a number of other possible maladies, including "bad SA" (whatever it is), "incorrect adaptative" (again whatever it is) or some other ones, but it is more probable that it is simply a "bad area" or a "bad head/translator".

 

It is like, actually it is exactly like, you had a flu and you decided to put your left ankle in a cast (which may be a good cure for a broken ankle but totally irrelevant for the flu).

 

If it is only a "bad area", it is maybe possible to recover part of the sectors using something like ddrescue to copy *whatever* remains accessible to another hard disk, if it is a bad head, a whole side of a platter is simply "lost forever", if it is *anything else* as well the disk is lost forever unless - maybe, and I want to underline maybe -  a professional data recovery company can fix it.

 

Sorry for your loss :(, but really nothing that you can do with a CA-42 cable.

 

jaclaz

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Ah, the venerable Jaclaz answers! ;)

 

Thank you for your answer and the humorous analogy that I am attempting to treat an illness in a totally unrelated, unconnected, uninformed, unhelpful, and unrealistic manner (!).

 

That's a bummer.  Any idea why the partition info is completely lost - I am wondering if trying to recreate the partition would at least allow me to try to recover the data that is on it as the data recovery tools I am using now are all stuck at even finding a partition.......

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If the "bad area" includes the MBR there is simply NO address where to look for the actual partitons (JFYI: Windows asks to initialize the disk when the "Magic Bytes" 55AA miss from the end of first sector).

 

But this does not mean that *all* the disk contents are lost (though it is possible).

 

The generic procedure is to create a "clone" of the disk (or an image of it) using a dedicated tool, like the mentioned ddrescue, which basically:

  1. attempts to read a sector (and repeats the attempt reading it a given number of times)
  2. if it succeeds in reading the sector, it writes the sector to the target
  3. if it fails in reading the sector, it writes a 00ed sector to the target
  4. then it goes on next sector and loops to #1

 

the actual algorithm is more complex, but you get the idea.

 

Once ddrescue has finished, you start examining the target (be it clone or image) and see what you can recover from it, in some cases you can get a whole partition/filesystem "sound enough" to be mounted and accessed normally or almost normally, in most you get only "RAW" sectors and when this happens recovering contiguous (i.e. defragmented) files is normally possible, if the files are fragmented (or very large, or both) you can still have some chances through more advanced carving/rebuilding techniques, it's impossible to say what will happen in a specific case, too many factors affect the chances of partial data recovery.

 

Generally speaking, it is a terrible idea :w00t::ph34r: to scan the failed disk for fragments or attempting to recover sectors, if you suspect that the disk is failing as it is possible that you have one chance and once only to read a sector, and this chance should be used to copy the sector on a surely working target, but again it depends on which is the actual issue at hand, I have very old disk drives that developed a given "bad area" but that - excluded that area - continued working for years (limited to the non bad sectors) and as well I have seen disks that once started developing bad sectors increased their number very fast.

 

 

jaclaz

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