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kirby · Active contributor Joined: 03 Dec 2007 Posts: 5

I have a nearly dead Seagate 300Gb SATA drive that is about 2.5 years old.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.8
300 Gbytes

Model : ST3300831AS
P/N : 9Y7384-301
Firmware : 3.01

Date Code : 05243
Site Code : AMK
Product of Singapore

Came home one day and discovered that the computer was frozen. From the clock display on the frozen screen it happened just 1.5 hours prior.

Then it was unable to be boot up and only boot up to the colourful XP logo page. Could not finish boot with safe mode either.
Memtest the RAM and they were OK.

At that stage I can still connect it up to an external enclosure and display the content of folders. Started to use HDD regenerator overnight. Only ran about 1/8 or so and found over 170 bad sectors. The process was stopped because I want to recover some files needed for the day. Then the HDD started to have big problem and could hardly be recognised as an USB device via the external enclosure. Same if I connected it via eSATA port.

Soon it become totally unaccessible. It then got so bad then even BIOS could not recognise it at all.

All the time the platters are still spinning fine. There were never any lound or unusual noise at all.

Brought it to my friend who does data recovery and he could not do anything because the drive is not recognised by BIOS.

It is not worth going to the specialised data recovery lab for the amount of valuable data it contains.

Tried the deep freezing method. No working at all.

After coming across this web site and forum, I bought a secondhand Seagate 300Gb SATA with the same model number BUT a slightly different firmware revision.

It is 3.02 instead of 3.01 of my HDD.

Swapped the PCB over. The faulty drive is still spinning as before but the BIOS still CAN NOT recognise the HDD.

What else can I do?

Please help!

Thanks!

kirby · Active contributor Joined: 03 Dec 2007 Posts: 5

OK I tried out another HDD of the same with yet a different firmware revision from that of 3.01 of the faulty HDD.

Once again it did not work. HDD spinning but not recognised by BIOS.

I then tried out an experiment.

I transplanted the PCB of the faulty HDD to a working HDD that has PCB firmware 3.02

The working HDD now does not recognise by BIOS as well!!

There are two possibility here.
1) The faulty HDD has a faulty head AND a faulty PCB
2) you would need an exact firmware revision when swapping PCB.

Can anyone shed some light?

kirby · Active contributor Joined: 03 Dec 2007 Posts: 5

I did another experiment.

I have two similar working HDDs. One with 3.02 and another with 3.03 firmware revision.

I swapped the PCB between them. All of a sudden BIOS does not recognise both of them. When swapped back they are fine again.

Does this mean that you will need to have the EXACT firmware revision PCB to do the transplantation???

salvationlaura · Deadharddrive regular Joined: 12 Mar 2008 Posts: 11

If the incorrect firmware will cause the detecting problems in BIOS, sometimes clicking sound insie the disks too.

there are some symptoms caused by firmware problems:

1. HDD is not identified or identified by its factory alias ( such as Maxtor N40P, Maxtor Romulus, Maxtor Athena, Maxtor Ares64, Maxtor Calypso, Maxtor Proxima, Maxtor Rigel...);

2. HDD starts the motor and then hangs.

3. HDD capacity is identified incorrectly in the BIOS, more or less;

4. HDD can identify correctly in the BIOS, but all sectors are displayed as bad sectors, space partitioning is impossible;

5. HDD is very slow in reading/writing/formatting.

You can try to write the same firmware back to the disk. I hope there is no mechanical failure of your disk.
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hddstudio · Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 11:15 am Post subject: