Seagate 160 GB SATA HARD DRIVE PCB

Not an option, there is information about the drive platters, heads, etc, stored on NVRAM on the card. Any other card won't hve the right information.

Why not if the heads and the platters are the same which they should be in an identical drive. Critical data is stored on an engineering track on the media itself, not nvram.

You need to find an identical drive to swap the board from. Even that might not work due to differences in the firmware and other data specific to your drive. Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

Any specific drive is never generic. It, and all others made in the same batch, with exactly the same hardware, were caused to scan themselves and note each bad physical spot on each platter. The number of such spots is sometimes zero, more often not. Depending on the specific manufacturer, this info is stored in NVRam on the PCB (possibly on the disk itself, somewhere, as well). The bad physical spots are mapped-around in the drive's firmware so that normal disk I- O does not attempt to use them.

The (**VERY**) expensive data recovery services have created hardware and software capable of getting around these drive-unique characteristics for possibly thousands of sets of drive hardware (and production block changes). That is why they are expensive. It may be worth your time to substitute a new drive PCB and try it...but don't get your hopes up.

Good luck!

You could be correct, but I just went through the same problem with the HD in one of my Macs - the board was fried well done. A new board was installed, and the computer is fine, with no loss of data.

That was your mistake.. You let the smoke out!

--
"I'm never wrong, once i thought i was, but was mistaken"
Real Programmers Do things like this.
http://webpages.charter.net/jamie_5

Drive controllers mask out bad sections in the drive. 2 identical drives with the same contents may have different mappings on the platter.

--
"I'm never wrong, once i thought i was, but was mistaken"
Real Programmers Do things like this.
http://webpages.charter.net/jamie_5

I've had about a 50% success rate with this trick, and the last drive I tried it with was 1.2GB so chances may be slim, however it won't normally hurt anything to try, assuming the drives are identical.

You also may be able to repair the original drive, I did that once on a SCSI drive that got a glass of water spilled on it while running. It fried one of the surface mount motor driver IC's and I was able to find a suitable replacement.

happened

came,

Hard

damage

Disk in

get that

heads,

right

can one just replace nvram on new card with ones old card ? robb

i get that

platters, heads,

the right

should be in

track on the

in the

number

the

physical

disk I-

hardware

hardware (and

may be

don't

if moving the nvram from old drive pcb to new pcb does not work then ...

Is is not possible to reset the nvram on the new card so that it thinks there are no bad spots ( a fresh and clean drive so to speak )

AFAIK since the disk layout information is FileSys info on the drive, put there by operating system then the OS should not send a request to access a spot on drive that is actually bad ? just access spots where it knows the data was placed ? any READ errors could handle by OS (slow things up a bit)

only trouble i suppose would be trying to write new data then there would be trouble (using nvram clear) but i am hoping the OP only wants to recover (ie READ) the DATA to a new drive ???? yes ???? and NOT planning to BOOT from this drive either ???

m2c robb

One basic question would be: Even if the bad block data is wrong, assuming no bad blocks are present in the boot/root area, will it still be usable enough to get most of the data off and/or will a common disk repair utility be able to deal with it and repair it?

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Care to share where you read that? Apparently I've been in error all these years thinking this data was written to an engineering track.

I don't know if it's the defect map, or something else, but some controllers will only work with the drive they came with. I tried swapping boards between identical Toshiba ipod drives and they wouldn't work at all without their original board. The drives would spin up, but would just went click click clik.

If you can identify the EEPROM you might be able to make it work by swapping them. Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

Or it may be possible to rig up an adapter to read and write the EEPROM contents in circuit. Most of those EEPROMs are pretty simple and use SPI, I2C, or 1Wire.

I would try getting an identical drive and pcb revision and just swap it. Don't know about the mapping but yesterday i swapped the board from a

120 gb ibm deskstar with one that came off a clicking drive, it repaired the dead drive.

Cheetah

Hi Meat - how's it going ? HDDs are funny things. I had my 20GB data drive fail the other day. One minute it was fine, next I couldn't access it. Very odd too (well I think anyway) that it is spinning ok, and the BIOS correctly 'sees' it, and correctly reports its model, size, cluster size and so on, but when you boot Windoze, a message regarding failure of the secondary slave HD flashes up - so quickly, of course, that you just can't quite read it properly. Windoze doesn't see it at all - it just doesn't appear in the drive management screen, so you can't even attempt to force it to a manual mount. Just for sport I tried it in another machine running '2000 rather than XP, and again, BIOS sees it fine, but not the OS. I suppose I could have tried in DOS, but by then, I had lost interest and replaced it with a

250GB drive which cost less than a good meal out, and restored it contents from the external backup drive that I maintain (there's a lesson for the OP to learn there, methinks ...) I've still got the drive, and have a friend who makes a (very good !!) living from disc data recovery, so I might let him have a look one of these days when I'm passing his shop, just out of curiosity.

Just as a matter of interest, as well as the "Well just how much is your lost data worth, sir ?" angle of his business, he has also invested a considerable amount of money in the software and hardware to do the job, and sometimes, recovering the data can be very labour-intensive. Probably doesn't *justify* the large amounts of money that he can (and does) charge for the service, but might go some way to mitigating his rates ...

Arfa

I swapped boards on an old Conner RLL drive and it worked :)

You could copy the bits off with a magnifying glass on those. :)

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+Lasers | Sam's Laser FAQ: | Mirror Sites:

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On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:33:36 +0000, Arfa Daily wrote:

Good story and references Arf. I keep nothing but an operating system and temporary data on the drive in my PC. My data is stored on a network storage server (Linksys NSLU2) utilizing two 300 gig drives, one of which is hidden. Every morning at 3 am, a changed file and incremental backup from the visible to hidden drive occurs automatically. Should the visable drive fail (has happened once in the past 3 years) I merely make the hidden drive the main drive (plug it into USB port 1) and all my data is there. Then I replace the hidden drive and life goes on all happy happy. If perhaps the NSLU2 itself were to fail, I have purchased another just in case. If I had not done that, the file system is a linux ext2 IIRC and all data could be transferred effortlessly to this PC. Ive got about 450 bucks into this strategy to maintain the integrity of my critical data and it is as good a solution as you will find anywhere at any price. There is one drawback that being network transfer rates. Even at switched 10/100, large files take awhile to transfer but I don't store a lot of those. I store and actively work on mostly pictures from my digital camera, my email database, and documents I have created or modified. Somehow speed is of little concern because I'm sure that when catastrophe strikes, I grab a drive cloned with my operating system off the shelf and I'm back in business in less than 10 minutes. I really cringe when I see people storing hundreds gigs worth of data on there only PC hard disk. At the very least buy an external USB drive people.