Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Seagate HDD not spinning up. Is data recovery possible?

Jul 7, 2006 1:19PM PDT

My daughter's PC failed on bootup and it appears that the HDD is at fault. It is a Seagate Barracuda Ultra ATA, Model ST313620A, capacity 13,520Mb. Yep, I know it's 13.5Gb but that's what the label says.

I tried it in my PC as a slave, just in case it was a power issue, as the PSU in her's had been replaced about 1 year previously, but I was not able to boot at all. (No OS detected on either drive). I then tried it with a USB IDE adaptor, which has it's own PSU, but no joy. I removed the back panel to gain access to the motor connections and tested for open or short circuit but they seem okay. When connected to the PSU, no power is reaching the motor, so it appears that the PCB is shot.

I am hoping to obtain a similar HDD and swap over the PCB to get the drive spinning and hopefully recover the data to another good drive. Question: Do I need to get an identical drive with the same Firmware and Addressable Sectors? I've managed to locate one that has the same Seagate Model # but is labelled as 13.6Gb and the Firmware # is 3.11 instead of 3.10. It also has slightly more Addressable Sectors.

Any advice regarding this would be most welcome as my daughter is keen to recover pictures of her baby.

Thanks,

Gourockian

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
My thought is yes....but nothing (but common sense) to back
Jul 9, 2006 6:52AM PDT

it up. Even if you do that ...make sure it's set up as a slave ... not a master or bootable drive Might be worth checking with a data recovery PRO like ONTRACK to see what they'd charge if the data is really realy important and user recovery questionable.

Let us know.

VAPCMD

- Collapse -
Seagate HDD
Jul 9, 2006 10:34AM PDT

Thanks, VAPCMD for replying.

I take it you mean to back up the data if I can recover it to another drive, in the event of a repeat crash in the future. If I can just manage to do a recovery, this drive will be getting trashed, as I have no wish to go through all this again, and neither does my daughter. I will certainly be re-emphasizing to her the need to do regular backups from now on.

As to using a data recovery service, it really would be more expensive than we could afford, even though the data is important to her.

Regards,

Gourockian

- Collapse -
My 'guess' is the data is there intact and with the working
Jul 10, 2006 8:58AM PDT

logic board, it's more likely to be a matter of copyng the data to another HDD once it's up and running. Make sure you connect it so you're not booting from it.

Re backup..I'm a firm firm believer ... I always have the data and two copies for backup. Just too time consuming to reinstall everything on a custom PC (vs store bought PC using restore discs). I image my C: partition, then my D: partition onto a second HDD
and then copy the images to an external. If drive one becomes corrupt and can't be fixed simply...I can reformat C: and restore a clean working images. If drive 0 dies, I replace the HDD and restore the images from the 2nd HDD. Beats the heck out of finding discs, product keys, reinstalling evrything, updating everything ... makes me tired just talking about it.

Good Luck and let us know how it works.

VAPCMD

PS..Try NTBackup....it's part of XP...may help you avoid getting dragged into this next time.