www.deadharddrive.com

[nev]

Have you managed to successfully restore a hard drive?
Share your story with others here!

Nev

[Guest]

I already sent you an email, but I wanted to post here just in case you didn't receive the mail.

Well, things in my life were moving along when all of the sudden Thursday - BLAM - reality slaps me right upside the head as one of my hard drives, a made-in-Singapore Seagate 160 GB ST3160021A with all my e-mail, completely dies.

No, we're not talking about a slow death or foreseen event, we're talking an abrupt death. The drive wasn't whirring or clicking - it wasn't moving at all. Checking google and praying, I ran across your site and it described my problem exactly. So I did as you suggested and bought another drive -this was a made-in-China one since I live in China, and I was worried about compatability - but the firmware v3.06 was the same. I also bought the Torx screwdriver set and when I got home I swapped out the logic board.

Crossing my fingers, I put the drive in a case and turned it on. As luck would have it, the drive ran perfectly. Anyway, I thought you might like to know that you were spot on.

Cheers

Curt

[LaptopGuest]

I too am in the exact pickle, but here's a twist: the drive is a laptop HD! I read the guide (very informative and hope inspiring), and as soon as I get my drive back from Ontrack, I am going to try it on my own. I will probably try to put together a guide with pics if I am successful. Cross your fingers real hard that I am successful!

[nev]

Thanks for the story Curt!

Hope you're successful LaptopGuest.
It would be interesting to see the differences so be sure to whack up a link to your pictures!

[MetalGear]

Came across this site sometime ago.. Anyway, its an excellent guide on that PCB swapping technique to revive hard drives.

Over many, years I also had done the same thing.. to recover data or to revive hard drives. From my experience, I had more success with Seagate hard drives than any others. Also great success with ancient Conner drives (less than 1GB ones). Some success on Samsung drives and limited success on IBM ones.

The one I rarely had success with are Maxtor drives . I find these very prone to data corruption, bad sectors and head crashes.. These all simply died suddenly without any warnings - one moment working fine then the next died suddenly.

And practically no success at all with either Quantum, Fujitsu or Western Digital. These drives suffer disc problems and mechanical failures a lot. But I see that some people here have success with them.. Congrats!

Personally I had one Quantum FireBall lct 10GB ATA myself which died suddenly, spins up and keeps clunking away.. later spins down.. Even after finding the same board and firmware (from a working drive), it didn't revive the drive either.. worse still as the drive didn't even spin-up at all this time!

That's all for now...

[Hoping it work]

Van, can you offer some degree of confidence that this will work DESPITE a really stupid move on my part?

I put the power plug in a perfectly good and spinning hard drive upside down until I realized it would not fit.....but it made contact just quick enough that it no longer spins and when "properly" connected, it just knocks the power supply down, shutting everything down instantly. I have to pull the power supply cord off, let it sit a few minutes, then the power supply (tried several - same deal) comes back on. As soon as I try to connect the power to the drive, it instantaneously shuts off everything at the power supply level.

I have reason to believe anything is wrong or corrupt on the data side.. Just smoked a diode or something, mayby a logic chip..

Got my fingers crossed as there is TONS of data I really would treasure to get back.

[Guest]

! nice )

[Guest]

I've just got back about 100GB of invaluable data that I thought I'd lost and my experiences maybe useful to others.

I had my P4 case apart and was physically reorganising my disks to improve cooling when a disk slipped and landed on my Seagate160GB PCB.
I didn’t notice anything at the time, but when fired it all I got was some clicking from the disk.

On inspection I saw that I managed to break off a component - some kind of inductance device?

After some initial cursing I got onto Google and eventually found www.deadharddrive.com and some similar experience postings.
The consider advice was that I needed to get another PCB of exactly the same Firmware revision - 3.06 in my case.

I started to watch ebay for my disk model (ST3160021a) and each time one came up, I would ask the seller for Firmware version. Eventually, I got lucky, bought it swapped over the PCB and all is now well. - The disk fired up first time and my data is back online.

Along the way couple of other things I did:
Contacted Seagate support asking for advice wrt the importance of the Firmware revision, etc.
I received a polite, but not particularly helpful reply:
Basically they are saying – this kind information is proprietary to the company and trying to replace these boards also would likely void any warranty on the drives. Oh, and they don’t do spare parts!

Hmm! - I’m in fix. I’m not too worried about warranty – it’s the data that’s important. The data lost without a working pcb. The replacement pcb route seems the only way to go!

I found a useful site at www.ultratec.co.uk who, amongst other things, list and recycle just working PCB’s - for about £25.

As I now own a spare 160GB ‘working’ disk, I shall be looking out for a suitable replacement PCB.

Hope this is useful.

[yahyaue]

I already emailed this to you and I'll share it here also,

I just wanted to thank you for your story. I was planning on reseating my heatsink so I shutdown as usual did what I planned on doing hooked everything back up double checked everything, then powered up. Windows started normally I’m thinking everything is okay, now I have 4 hard drives connected 2 wd raptor 150 in raid 0, Seagate 300gb and the Maxtor 300gb which I use for storage. So I get ready to go into the Maxtor to retrieve something from storage, double click my computer get ready to double click my storage disk and that when I realize that it’s not there. Shut down check wiring, it is okay boot back up this time I go straight to bios to check and still no Maxtor. The Maxtor is an Ide drive which I have running to a sata connection via an adapter, so I changed adapters, sata cable and then tried via ide cable nothing. I googled dead hard drive and read your story. I did not wish to change logical boards but was going to try if there was no other alternative. I caught what you said about the freezer and said what the hell I’ll give it a shot . Took the Maxtor out, put in the static free wrapping it came in, yeah I save that stuff, then put it in the plastic case and into the freezer for about a day and a half. I took it out of the case and quickly put it back in the pc and waalaa presto chango, a working Maxtor. This was about 3 days ago, I have since copied all my data from the hard drive and have shut down a couple of times since then and it is still working. Needless to say it's days of being a vital part of my system are long gone, but I’ll give it a sense of purpose until until it goes out to pasture.
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[Sam13]

Thanks for sharing your story here....
Me, its been a while that I didnt have a successful story in restoring hard drive....
Thank you and God speed..
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