Need Help with Dead Hard Drive (Seagate)

Hardware Hub Storage
1

I’m a lurker. I shamelessly seek your help despite never having contributed.

My
500GB Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD ST500LM000

data drive
data drive1440×2560 477 KB

recently passed on. I wish to recover the data.

One day this drive simply stopped powering on and became completely inacessible.
“Research” indicated that the driver dying was a common issue with this model, so I decided to repurchase the the same model on ebay in order to swap out the driver…

Picture of the proud drive donating its driver:

driver donor
driver donor1440×2560 468 KB

It got the drive to power on again… only to reveal that this drive had been dealt far more damage than just a dead driver.
I tried ddrescue. Every attempt resulted in 100% read failure rate.

I have no idea what I’m doing. help.
blowing on the connector didn’t help
I’m guessing the heads are stuck somehow
It is as you suspect: This drive is from a Windows laptop.

  1. What is my damage?
  2. What’s wrong with the drive?
  3. What are the next steps I should take in order to rescue the data on that drive?

Here’s my dmesg if it’s any help:
dmesg.txt (6.6 KB)

Here’s just the audio of the hard drive failure for some reason (recorded using a microphone):

2

I’m no expert, but in my experience, I’ve never recovered a drive once its reached the repeating ‘head click’ sound. The only thing I’ve been able to do in this circumstance is send them to a data retrieval company, but that is expensive and not guaranteed to get the data back.

Maybe someone else here will have a way or an idea and we can both learn something new about recovering a dead drive.

3

since you already have a replacement controller, try system-rescue-cd has some tools on there for data recovery, namely ddrescue. you can also dd if=/dev/sd* of=/home/$USER/outputfile.img status=progress, as that is what I use for failed disks

4

Rossmann Repair offers data recovery, might pitch them an email and ask about prices.

5

My friend just told me that Rossmann refuses to do repairs on anything the customer has already ****ed with.

ddrescue had a 100% read fail rate.

6

if ddrescue is failing, either the motor is dead or your new controller is improperly connected

7

The drive does spin up. Or at least it vibrates. It also makes 2 clicking noises every time it is powered up.

edit: How can I ensure that the controller is properly connected?

8

check the drive model and look up wire diagrams, you might have a newer controller than that you have replaced
meaning the wire layout might have changed
I only suggest it since it happened to me and a Seagate

9

I’m pretty sure you cannot just swap out the control pcb from one drive to another, each drive has a unique calibration stored on a ROM chip, which should be copied.
If you care about your data, just stop trying to recover and rollback any changes you made, if all you have done is replace the pcb, there is a good chance you haven’t done permanent damage, just give it to an expert along with the doner, many things can go wrong.

10

you can’t just rollback changes if the drive isn’t responding
tl:dr Hard Drive Beeping can be caused by:

Seized/stuck/burned-out spindle motor hub
Damaged read/write heads
Seized disk platters
A shorted PCB
11

I

I don’t know about this particular drive model, on many drives the pcb is accessible from the back of the drive and connected with a ribbon cable, I am assuming they replaced the pcb without opening the platter chamber, so the hope is they didn’t do something to the platter or head assembly that caused a mechanical damage.
I also believe above article describes the cases where a drive begins to click on its own, not after replacing the pcb from a different drive without copying calibration data; as described by the original post, the original failure was a dead drive indicating a dead controller pcb.
What they should be hoping for, is that the clicking is caused by a controller repeatedly restarting due to soft failures like mismatched calibration data.
This is all speculation and not based on any concrete facts, even the assumption that patient drive has a dead pcb could be wrong, and even if the doner drive has the same part number, that doesn’t necessarily mean it has the same pcb revision … Again many things can go wrong, and many times damage is not recoverable, so they really need to stop and go to an expert if they care about the data.

12

I have not opened the drive up. All I did was unscrew the PCB with which the hard drive didn’t power on and replace it with the PCB of a confirmed working drive of the same model with identical non-unique alphanumeric identifiers. The big difference in production dates was concerning, but that was as close I could get it.
According to the label, the firmware is also the same.

The only actions involved in swapping the PCBs were screwing and unscrewing. In hindsight, it’s obvious I should’ve also provided pictures of the backside…

signal-attachment-2020-06-07-014612
signal-attachment-2020-06-07-0146122560×1440 489 KB

I did not mess with anything else. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to do a platter swap some day just to see if I can, but at the moment I’m not confident enough in my ability to improvise a clean chamber.

The reason I chose to risk swapping PCBs was, because several people online seem to have successfully magicked away their Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD problems with this method and because it seemed simple enough that even a moron like me could do it.

edit:
I also made sure to minimize the number of times I powered on the device, excluding the first time before I realized how much worse the drive’s condition actually was. I tried ddrescue when I made the video and audio recordings… But because I’m a genius, I didn’t record the ddrescue progress and I didn’t want to turn on the device again.

edit 2: And the insulation was never removed from the intact PCB. The one in the photo is the defective board. The intact PCB is on the broken drive on the left and the working drive is without its PCB on the right.

1 Like
13

I think most likely, no permenant damages is done. Hopefully rolling back will get you to the same point you started with.
The trick, as far as I know, is to copy the calibration data from patient PCB to doner (or fix the PCB if possible).

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