Hard Drive Failure Help

[bakkaman]

Hey guys, so it seems that my main hard drive is dead. Yesterday when installing a new psu, I forgot to switch out the cables for my drives and then I smelled and saw smoke coming from my HDD. From the on it wouldn't even spin whether it was plugged in directly or by a SATA/IDE to USB kit. I tried replacing the PCB with one of the exact same model, and now the drive will spin for a little bit and then stop. Since it's a seagate drive, I've run Seatools to no avail. It fails every test except for the "Short Drive Self Test". And when I go to use their recovery software, it tells me that there may be physical errors and that it can't read the data. As a last ditch effort, I took off the top of the drive to see what was going on. I've attached a video of what happens when I power it on using my SATA/IDE to USB kit. The data isn't incredibly important, just a bunch of old photos of my family and I, but it'd really be nice to have it back.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

IMG_0303.MOV

[Beeeyeee]

5 minutes ago, bakkaman said:

Hey guys, so it seems that my main hard drive is dead. Yesterday when installing a new psu, I forgot to switch out the cables for my drives and then I smelled and saw smoke coming from my HDD. From the on it wouldn't even spin whether it was plugged in directly or by a SATA/IDE to USB kit. I tried replacing the PCB with one of the exact same model, and now the drive will spin for a little bit and then stop. Since it's a seagate drive, I've run Seatools to no avail. It fails every test except for the "Short Drive Self Test". And when I go to use their recovery software, it tells me that there may be physical errors and that it can't read the data. As a last ditch effort, I took off the top of the drive to see what was going on. I've attached a video of what happens when I power it on using my SATA/IDE to USB kit. The data isn't incredibly important, just a bunch of old photos of my family and I, but it'd really be nice to have it back.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

IMG_0303.MOV

can't you send it to seagate and have them put the platter in a new enclosure? I think thats really the only way. 

[bakkaman]

3 hours ago, Beeeyeee said:

can't you send it to seagate and have them put the platter in a new enclosure? I think thats really the only way. 

Is there any way to manually do this?

[Beeeyeee]

1 hour ago, bakkaman said:

Is there any way to manually do this?

I don't think you can buy an empty enclosure. look up some videos on it maybe?

[bakkaman]

3 hours ago, Beeeyeee said:

I don't think you can buy an empty enclosure. look up some videos on it maybe?

By enclosure, do you mean something like this?

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NO-HARD-DRIVE-Seagate-USB-3-0-Expansion-2-5-Notebook-Enclosure-/222042293109

[Beeeyeee]

no no. so your problem is something super weird, maybe the motor or something. all the actual data on the hard drive is on that silver platter. so if you take literally just that disk and put it in a new hard drive with a new motor and electronics and everything.. it should be able to read the data. but you have to be extremely careful. talk to seagate. it may still be under warranty and maybe they'll give you a deal for recovering the data

[bakkaman]

3 hours ago, Beeeyeee said:

no no. so your problem is something super weird, maybe the motor or something. all the actual data on the hard drive is on that silver platter. so if you take literally just that disk and put it in a new hard drive with a new motor and electronics and everything.. it should be able to read the data. but you have to be extremely careful. talk to seagate. it may still be under warranty and maybe they'll give you a deal for recovering the data

Unfortunately, by removing the sticker on the front to undo the screws and take the top off, it voided the warranty. I do however, have an exact replica of the hard drive. I'll look around online for techniques for moving the platter and eventually decide what to do. Thanks a lot though!

[Beeeyeee]

1 minute ago, bakkaman said:

Unfortunately, by removing the sticker on the front to undo the screws and take the top off, it voided the warranty. I do however, have an exact replica of the hard drive. I'll look around online for techniques for moving the platter and eventually decide what to do. Thanks a lot though!

good luck.

[scottyseng]

10 hours ago, bakkaman said:

-snip-

I'm pretty sure the motor on the drive is dead or dying. Whatever caused the smoke probably was related to it failing. You could try something like Piriform's Recuva, but I think it's too late now...you shouldn't have removed the top of the drive, that's a bad thing to do. If even a speck of dust got into it, you could destroy the drive.

 

And no, you cannot move platters to a working drive without some specialized tools / proper knowledge. Hard drives have strict tolerances on alignment and if even a slight bit off, you could send the read head grinding into the platters. I hate to say it, but you're probably out of options at this point...other than data recovery services.