Reviving a Dead Hard Drive?

[stardust3]

I've got a hard drive I'm trying to revive for data recovery, it's a seagate sata 160 gb. I bought a sata/ide to usb adapter with external pwr supply. When drive is powered is makes a beeping & a clicking noise, drive does spin freely & is not locked up. Right now it's bagged up in the freezer, going to give it a day before trying again.

Have a feeling circuit board is bad. Found a replacement online pretty cheap. Anyone have advice for this problem. Losing the data on this is not the end of the world, however it would be nice to salvage without breaking the bank.

 

[mike123abc]

The freezer technique will sometimes work. I have never ventured to replace the circuit board.

 

[jevans64]

Replacing the PCB is kind-of tricky. You need to get the identical PCB revision number on the "donor" drive as the bad drive. This means trying to get as close to the date code and site code AND it has to have the same firmware version as the original. That isn't an easy task when the only source is either eBay or a business that stocks a lot of old drives specifically for that purpose. That is why recovery companies charge extreme rates to recover data. It is simply easier to have a clean room and remove the platters from the old drive and place them in specialized recovery hardware.

Clicking usually indicates a major drive failure, like a bad PCB or R/W heads. If the drive clicks but can still be detected by the OS, then maybe all it needs is a recovery using HDAT2, a free recovery utility that works well with drives with bad sectors.

Seagate had major issues with faulty firmware in their Baracuda drives in the 320 to 750 GB range that needed to be "reset" using a UART cable and a terminal program in Windows to issue commands at the device level.