Seagate Barracuda: Replaced PCB, looks good in Disk Manager but does NOT appear in Windows Explorer

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ice-9

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Feb 8, 2015
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I have a Seagate Barracua LP 2TB HDD. This was originally housed in an IOMEGA external USB enclosure belonging to my son. When it failed (don't know how or why) he asked me to work on it. The problem was almost definitely the PCB and I used a mail in service to replace it with one that had compatible firmware for this disk. That seems to have worked: The disk now sounds as though it is operating and it appears in Device Manager and Disk Manager, which identifies all three original partitions and labels it a “healthy disk”. I can NOT, however, see it in Windows Explorer, so I can’t access the files. I’m using Windows 7, 32-bit. Seagate's "Disc Wizard" offers no help either. It appears to be intended primarily for error checking or new disk installation.

Note that I have tried it in the IOMEGA USB enclosure as well as installing it directly in my computer with the SATA cables. I get the same results. Disk Manager will not allow me to assign a drive letter. Most of the solutions I find online recommend re-partitioning it. That would probably work, but it would delete the data that is on here, and my main goal is to retrieve that data. Is the easiest solution to simple repartition and then use a utility like Piriform’s “Recuva” to access the data?

Any advice…?
 
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ice-9

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Feb 8, 2015
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To my understanding, it had been. I sent the original board to an online service that provided a replacement board with the ROM from the original board. I have reason to believe that they are a reliable service with a proven track record, but of course I can't totally be 100% sure. Should I be questioning whether they did not supply a good board with the original ROM data? Or is there another possible problem? If they failed to copy the original ROM to my new disk, would it even work at all? Would Disk Manager recognize it as a healthy disk?
 
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ice-9

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Feb 8, 2015
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Right, but maybe I wasn't clear. This is a service that takes your old broken board and presumably transfers the ROM data specific to your drive onto a new and functioning board. This service is offered in many places online. I had it done by a vendor I found on EBAY with a long sales history and overwhelmingly positive reviews, All indications are that it is working without any unusual errors or behavior, but you're right, I can't be 100% sure.

So far I've had some luck booting to a Linux disk and using the utilities there to mount and access the disk. I haven't been home a lot so work has been sporadic. If I have success I will provide the details here...
 
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fzabkar

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The PCB and "ROM" transfer seem to be OK. The problem appears to be a logical one, ie file system related.

I would try to mount each of the partitions with Partition Find and Mount:

http://findandmount.com/

Otherwise, I would examine the drive with a disc editor, eg DMDE (freeware).

http://dmde.com/

Could you show us DMDE's Partitions window?
 
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ice-9

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Feb 8, 2015
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I had tried "find and mount" but even it wouldn't "see" the disk, so I couldn't select it to mount it. This was the problem with several of the mounting solutions I tried.

In the end, I used a Linux boot disk (ISO here: Puppy LInux) and used the utilities therein to access the disk. I've never really worked with Linux so it took some learning my way around, but in the end the mounting utility there identified and mounted all three partitions and allowed me to read the files on the disk with the file manager there. It was surprisingly easy once I figured out what I was doing.

I pretty much clicked-and-dragged all the content from the "bad" disk to another USB disk I use for storage. Then I rebooted in Windows 7 and had access to all the rescued files on the storage disk.

Thank you all for the suggestions.
 
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