Seagate Data Recovery Question

[StarChild316]

My hard drive on my laptop crashed.

The drive is a Seagate (ST9500420ASG Momentus 7200.4 SATA 3Gb/s 500-GB 9HV144-150)

Here is what happens...When I install it within a HD enclosure onto a Windows Vista machine, It will recongize it in Disk Management as Unallocated space. Once I initialize it (within Vista) it tells me that a I/O error occured. I could not read it all because it would not initialize. The next thing I did was put in a Windows 7 pc direct as a slave hard drive. The computer did not recongize it anywhere what so ever. Then I used the same HD enclosure and my PC did the same thing as it did in Windows Vista, However it did show up in Device manager. This time though when I went to initialize it in Windows 7, it gave me some sort of semaphore error which im not sure about.

Once the drive is powered and even though it did not initialize there is no banging or scratching noise which I believe means the head is broken. Throughout my research I found that if it gets recongized within Device manager but wont initialize, it could be the logic board which is the board above the casing of the platters. The reason I come to the forums to see if anyone can agree or give me advice about changing the logic board and If I order another drive that is exactly the same and just change the logic board (pcb) if it would work and initialize my drive so I can extract the data?

Any advice would be deeply appreciated!

Thanks!!

 

[Hawkeye22]

Ummm, initializing the drive destroys the data currently on the drive. Since you already tried to initialize the drive, you may have made it worse. unless the data on this drive is critical, I'd chalk it up as a loss.

 

[StarChild316]

Ummm, initializing the drive destroys the data currently on the drive. Since you already tried to initialize the drive, you may have made it worse. unless the data on this drive is critical, I'd chalk it up as a loss.

I did not know that. So let me ask you this, if I tryed to initialize it and got 2 errors (i/o and semaphore), do you think it basically quick formatted the drive? What it says in disk management that scares me is it says almost 500GB available unallocated and I know that at least half the hard drive was used up.

 

[Hawkeye22]

If you got errors it may have done nothing. The initialization wizard normally pops up and lets you create partitions and format them. If possible, check the drive with seatools. If it's under warranty, return it.

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

 

[StarChild316]

If you got errors it may have done nothing. The initialization wizard normally pops up and lets you create partitions and format them. If possible, check the drive with seatools. If it's under warranty, return it.

http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

I appreciate the advice Hawkeye, however I tryed SeaTools and probably every type of recovery program LoL. No program can physically see the drive in order to explore it. Drive is to old to return too...bleh. My only hope is this PCB Logic Board change out, but cant find anyone with enough experience it seems. I dont want to send it out and pay those guys $500-$10000 dollars lol. I found an identical drive for $78.00 that I could steal the PCB board from.