I came home a couple of days ago to find the computer running very slowly and unable to re-boot. Found that the cpu cooler fan had failed and assumed that was the problem. Replaced the cooler but no luck. Removed the memory sticks one by one - no difference. The connected the internal HD's leaving only the SSD. It then booted correctly. So it came down to one HD which seems to have failed completely. It (Seagate Baracuda 1000GB SATA) is out of warranty but only around 2 years old. It also contains all my Reflect system images. I have tried in a docking station but is not recognised. Disk Management does not see it all. It is probably a write off but is there anything can be done to it? Never had a failure like this before.
If not seen in Disk Management when installed in the computer or in a docking station (assuming other drives in the docking station are seen) then it looks like the drive is toast and the only thing you can do is take it to a data recovery service to see if they can, through forensic recovery, get any of your data back. But understand this can cost $100s or even $1000s so you need to decide if worth it. This is why having backups of backups is essential.
Thanks Bill - that is what I thought, but I had to ask. I do keep a baseline on a USB drive which only runs when I need it. It is not worth any specialist recovery. The drive still spins and the heads operate at start up so curious as to what happened. My only idea is that the electronics are dead since Win can't see it. Just wondering if you can take the circuit board off another HD?
Yes, and this may will work if you can find the exact same replacement. But this can be a challenge because drive makers use different revision boards with the same model, depending on date of manufacture and even the factory where the drive was made. For example, the same model number drive may use different firmware on a drive made in Taiwan than the same model drive made in their Malaysia factory. Even if made in the same factory, if not during the same production run, the boards may, and often do have different revision numbers and different firmware. And they may or may not be compatible. And sadly, you cannot always tell what revision board you will get when ordering the part as they typically just go by part number, not revision number too. The motor spinning and read/write head moving to (or trying to move to) the boot sector just means the drive is getting power. It does not mean the data interface is working - as you have already suspected. This is something that you might attempt as a fun project (if not too costly) just to see if it will work. But I would not hold out much hope.
When swapping drive boards, you not only have to match the date, model, revision.. you have to swap out the eeprom which contains adaptive information.
But the problem is often with the EEPROM and they are often surface mounted (soldered to the board) - which makes it that much harder for the less experienced to deal with. And sadly, even then, if the new board makes the drive functional again, the data may have been totally corrupted from the old board. And it is often the EEPROM information where the board's revision information is stored. Back in the day, what we used to do when hard drives were really expensive and expending the resources was worth it, we would swap the boards then immediately run chkdsk /r on them. That would reset that adaptive (bad drive sectors, etc.) information in the EEPROM. If the data was accessible, fine. If not, we would format the drive and treat it as a blank disk.
