www.deadharddrive.com

[iloveyouguam]

Hello all,

Hope there is someone that can help me out. I'm fairly tech savy, but I've run into a problem I can't figure out. Kind of a long story, but hang in with me.

So, first off I've had a seagate ST31500341AS since January, purchased new with the CC1J firmware (latest). Last week I booted up my computer and my drive wasn't detected by the BIOS. I thought it might have been a loose wire (has happened to other SATA drive before) so I powered down and replugged the SATA cable.

Drive appears in BIOS, boot into Vista, drive is there, with all my folders listed. I double click on a folder, and after some time (5-10 minutes) I recieve error something like:

"The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error"

no wierd drive noises, drive sounds fine. Try different SATA cables, power cable, same problem.


Download Seatools, and then the wierdness happens. Whenever I start the SeaTools program, my drive vanishes from Vista. So, I grab the Seatools ISO and boot up from that. Drive is detected, but can't run any of the tests, fail before they even start.

SO, contact Seagate support and am told that it is not firmware related because my drive is detected, but that it is most likely the SATA controller on the PCB.

---> I had an old maxtor PCB die on me a couple years ago and was able to recover the data by finding an identical board. So I thought I could do the same.

So I found a drive with same everything (date code was only off by 1) and tried swapping the boards.

At boot up drive repeatedly clicked (seek noise) and after a while BIOS posted drive as the following:

drive name: ST_M13FQBL
serial: QNR_BFW
Firmware: 1204F3C8

4141 MB

?!?

Did I do something wrong? Can the boards not be swaped?

I put the new board back onto the new hard drive and everything was fine with it, put the old board back onto the old drive and same story with the wierd drive name and incorrect drive size..

any one with any suggestions? Thanks ahead of time.

[harddrivespecialist]

I will be breif.

It could be a board problem, but unlikely.
Most likely you have issue with a drive's heads, SA or a surface.

If you need your data, search for a data recovery pro near you.
If you data is not worth much, get a warranty replacement and move on.

You could simply swap a board on a old hard drive and make it work.
Nowdays, almost every board carries unique information about a drive, so it could only work on that drive, unless you able to reprogram that board.
_________________
www.datarecoveryne.com

[iloveyouguam]

thanks for the info. My question is more on the side of why the drive is giving wrong info for the drive name, firmware info and size. All of this was normal before I swapped the PCB's.... No wierd noises, and no corrupt info, just the initial I/O error, which I believe has something to do with the board.

secondly, the information on the drive is very important to me, but before I pay $300+ I'd like to try every option I can including porting into the board if needs be. I'm not looking for someone to hold my hand, just to maybe point me in the right direction as to why the identical boards are not compatible, and how/why the board ROM needs to be reprogrammed.

Again, I know a lot of people on this forum make there living off of doing this stuff, so someone must have come across something similar...

[RussWinters]

PCB hold Adaptive data specific to each drive.

When you transferred only the PCB it attempted to start up with THAT PCB's adaptive data.

This is why it clicks. Clicking is the heads attempting to initialize "track following" and being unable to, so they reset and try again which is where the click occurs.

[iloveyouguam]

Thanks for the reply. I understand now about the adaptive info, but that doesn't answer why now after reattaching the original PCB I am receiving this strange drive ID, and information.

[RussWinters]

When you put a PCB with the wrong Adaptives on to a drive; it isn't a good thing. Sometimes everything is ok, but sometimes it can corrupt your SA.