Hard drive not initialized, no capacity, no nothing

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Oliviervgirard

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Feb 11, 2016
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Hi,

A usb hardrive have failed pretty hard. First it was making a screeching sound and was not detectable.

I replaced the heads and had a new board cloned to replace the original one.

I inspected the top platter and it is mirror-like. I tried to play with sunlight reflection and it seem immaculate. At least the top one....

The disk is a Seagate Freeplay 1tb (ST91000430AS) that I connected to a sata 3 port for testing.

After the head/board swap, it's silent but the heads seem to be looking for something that's not there...

When I boot Windows 10 ask me to initialize the disk but give an I\O error.

In disk management, the drive shows itself as an unknown, uninitialized drive. It shows no capacity at all, I mean no number. It's blank.

When I open MiniTool Partition 9, it shows the disk as a "Bad Disk" with 0 byte capacity. If I try to recover a partition, it shows a 512 kB one. Not sure if it's the missing part or if I'll destroy everything even more....

Since there's no letter to the drive, no recovery software can see it (tried Easus and MiniTool power data recovery)

I see the drive in my BIOS but the motherbord cannot initialize it either during the post process.

This drive contain +/- 30gb of child pictures spawning across 10 years. My girlfriend was centralizing all of her photos ever when the drive died... there is no backup... she learned the harshest lesson about backups and I'm pretty much out of options now...

Anyone have a suggestion? At least an explanation of what's happening? No smart ass "your drive is dead" type of answer please... I already figured I'm in trouble....

1k$+ for professionnal recovery is wayyyy out of question.

Thanks
 
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01111111

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Jun 7, 2016
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Honestly, you can send it into Drive savers and they will quote you. We had a clients 20GB of photos only recovered for $700. I know it's expensive but it's hard to put a price on photos.
 
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Oliviervgirard

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Feb 11, 2016
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thanks for your answer!

well I wonder what the heck they are doing that I can't... specialised software I guess

That's a shame since the platters looks undammaged the board is a brand new clone and the heads have been salvaged from a brand new drive.

I wonder what's the problem, a couple of corrupted files I could understand but the whole drive not recognised/destroyed is beyond my comprehension, like a lot of other things in this world I might add lol

700$ (US I guess) is a crap LOAD of money for me. I mean unthinkable kind of crap load for a drive.

I'd need a new job like becoming president or start restoring dead drives ahah.

Any insight from an expert? (who don't mind giving up on a potential client ;) ?
 
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01111111

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Jun 7, 2016
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They may not be able to get you the data either but at least they will not charge you! If you can find a re-seller of their services most companies get 10% off.

I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall when they were trying to get data, would be interesting to see their procedure.

Well don't try to start restoring dead drives for work you are 0/1 already (assuming this is your first), haha.
 
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hang-the-9

hang-the-9

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Mar 25, 2010
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As soon as you opened the drive yourself you dropped the chances of it being fixed for a decent amount to about 0. There is no way you can see if there is an issue with the platters with a flashlight, unless there are clearly visible scratches.

Drive repair is done in a clean room, with proper tools, not in a bedroom with a screwdriver.
 
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Oliviervgirard

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Feb 11, 2016
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Thanks all for your answer.

Yeah I totally get that I may have actually destroyed it... but I had to try. Money is not something that I have access in that kind of amount, so I had to do it myself, with a screwdriver, in my room, with extra care. That's all I have access to.

So well... I guess I'll need to hunt some specialist who would care to check this for me. At least try to access the drive with some advanced hardware that can do deeper stuff, maybe like this interesting device I found called the RapidSpar Data Recovery Instrument.

Check this video 10m40, they talk about the G-list which have the same exact effect that I describe here:

https://youtu.be/T0Cn7gX9nNU?t=10m40s

By the way if anybody which have this unit would like like to give it a shot, let me know....
 
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BAM500

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Dec 9, 2016
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You pretty much screwed yourself by opening it.

Think about all the dust and crap that's in the air.

Now take a look at this image

If you took the hdd apart and then started it again, you most likely ruined the drive. You need a clean room in order to do what you did without destroying the drive. If you were to just have taken in apart and not powered it up. There may be a chance that a recovery operation can save it by cleaning the platter with a solvent of some sort, but you'd need to tell them you opened it yourself, and there would most likely be a hefty fee for doing so.
 
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Oliviervgirard

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Feb 11, 2016
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Well I already opened a few drives in the past and all of them worked perfectly after, so please stay calm. These dust particle most likely get expulsed by the centrifugal force and anyway would only affect a few sectors not the "whole drive and spend 2k$ for repair" scenario....

Data is very resilient on unscratched platters and I just need to find the way to reinitialize this drive

Thanks for any help
 
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