www.deadharddrive.com

[Guest]

I've just recovered 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 drives 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 up - 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, I did couple of other things :
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.