Seagate HD dead, swap PCB didn't work... thoughts?

[davecool]

Hi all. My drive is a Seagate ST32000542AS 2TB drive. These were pretty popular over the last year or so. I own 4 of them, all purchased around the same time.

One of them died. Initially, I was able to boot into SeaTools for DOS and it gave me an error of 9BEEA743 on the drive. Now the BIOS no longer sees it at all. Tried it in other computers and external cases. No weird sounds, so I figured it was a PCB issue.

Since I have 4 of the drives, I swapped the PCB from a known-good drive onto the bad drive. No dice: upon spin-up, I could hear the heads load and unload around 10 times before going silent and the drive was not accessible. I tried this with all the remaining boards (just in case there was some subtle differences), but with the same non-working result.

All the drives have the same model number, same firmware, same manufacture location, same numbers stamped into the PCB, same stickers attached to the PCB. Still, somehow incompatible with each other. As a test, I tried putting a good board onto a different good drive just to see if there was some kind of incompatibility even between working drives and there was! Same load/unload of the heads on spin-up. WTF!

Is Seagate locking their PCBs to the drives or something? *sigh*

Any thoughts out there as to what I can do now to get this drive running? My last resort is to send the drive into Seagate's recovery service to see if they can get my data back, but I am scared of what the bill might be...


Thanks!
David

 

[CaedenV]

As they say; if you dont have your data in at least 3 locations then it must not be important.

board swapping should still be possible on the drive. Perhaps try a different one?

 

[davecool]

I thought it had been backed up, so my frustration is palpable.

I've tried board swapping with 4 identical drives with no luck. Does anyone know if Seagate is preventing board swaps in new drives?

Thanks,
David

 

[leontips]

As i know they don't provide board swaps, they also have some recovery partners maybe you can try.

Check here: http://services.seagate.com

large suppiler of hdd pcb boards, such as HDDZone, Hard Dirve PCB, maybe you can also contact them if they have the matching pcb.

 

[Jtag75]

Hi all. My drive is a Seagate ST32000542AS 2TB drive. These were pretty popular over the last year or so. I own 4 of them, all purchased around the same time.

One of them died. Initially, I was able to boot into SeaTools for DOS and it gave me an error of 9BEEA743 on the drive. Now the BIOS no longer sees it at all. Tried it in other computers and external cases. No weird sounds, so I figured it was a PCB issue.

Since I have 4 of the drives, I swapped the PCB from a known-good drive onto the bad drive. No dice: upon spin-up, I could hear the heads load and unload around 10 times before going silent and the drive was not accessible. I tried this with all the remaining boards (just in case there was some subtle differences), but with the same non-working result.

All the drives have the same model number, same firmware, same manufacture location, same numbers stamped into the PCB, same stickers attached to the PCB. Still, somehow incompatible with each other. As a test, I tried putting a good board onto a different good drive just to see if there was some kind of incompatibility even between working drives and there was! Same load/unload of the heads on spin-up. WTF!

Is Seagate locking their PCBs to the drives or something? *sigh*

Any thoughts out there as to what I can do now to get this drive running? My last resort is to send the drive into Seagate's recovery service to see if they can get my data back, but I am scared of what the bill might be...


Thanks!
David

My board of the same drive does the same thing. Spin up 10 times then goes silent and dies.

I would be willing to swap pcb board with you to try,are you in the uk?

 

[tomsfans]

If your PCB's board number are the same, you need move your damaged PCB's BIOS to the replacement PCB.

You can move the BIOS from your original PCB by using hot-air gun, then solder it on the replacement board. Please refer: http://www.datarecoveryunion.com/hard-drive-rom-chip-swapreplacement/. Or you can find the electronics repair shop to help you.