Samsung spinpoint HM160HI

[rms59]

I really need some help with this. I have a Samsung spinpoint series M drive marked HM160HI/m in a HP laptop that will not boot up. The drive spins, is not noisy, but bios test says "replace hard drive".

I bought another in the hopes of swapping the hdd circuit board and although the two boards look the same, the other one is marked HM160HI/d, not a /m.

Is the /m and /d important?

Thanks
Dick

 

[COLGeek]

Yes, it is important. You can try to swap the boards, but there is a high likelihood that the HDD will not work with the other board. In your case, seems like you have very little to lose. Worth a shot.

 

[rms59]

I swapped boards and the drive still spins up but it just clicks every second now. I need to find a /m board. Any ideas where to look?

Dick

 

[COLGeek]

eBay would be your best bet. Look for the exact same model as your original HDD.

However, you may still get the same results (HDD may be internally damaged).

Last, you can always try a data recovery service. They will try to do what you are doing to access the data, by the way.

Good luck!

 

[rms59]

Update:

I installed the defective drive in my desktop and the bios recognizes it as drive 'E'. It also shows up in windows explorer but I can't read it.

I tried a few of these data recovery tools and can see a lot of files but they have filenames. Some I recognize.

Any good recommended tools? Should I try to rebuild the file structure?

 

[fzabkar]

Swapping boards is rarely successful for modern drives. This is because the serial EEPROM chips store unique, drive specific calibration data. These "adaptives" must be transferred from patient to donor.

In any case your problem appears to be logical, not physical, although the corruption may be due to bad sectors. Try running CHKDSK in readonly mode, ie do not allow it to repair anything.

 

[rms59]

I ran the chkdsk like you suggested and it brought back a boatload of files but also included all kinds of windows files. I stopped the process after 4 hours because I didn't know if chkdsk was bringing back usefull data and I wanted to see what the results were.

There were about 400 folders with each having an assortment of .dll files, .jpg files, and every other file imaginable. I could extract the photo files but looking for them in each folder was labor intensive and those 400 folders was only half the drive.

Being satisfied that photo files and documents were readable I went ahead and retried a program called "getdataback" that I tried before but didn't know how to use it properly. This time I scanned the defective drive correctly and found my document and photo directories all nicely listed but wasn't allowed to copy them. I had to buy the program online ($79) to retrieve the data but I got back all my photos and documents.

I'm an amateur photographer and take thousands of photos and normally, I have all my images, family photos, videos, and documents on my desktop computer's main drive - plus two external 500gb sata backup drives. At the end of each year I backup that year on a few DVD's and store those at my son's home. I haven't lost a photo since I switched to digital photograhy in 2000.

This time I got sloppy and had a bunch on my laptop when it went south that were not backed up and I ended up buying a few drives to try and swap boards but that never worked out so I will put those on ebay and get some of my money back.

Anyway, I got my data back. Thanks to all for the suggestions.

Dick