I lost a HDD. I had a two-week-old backup so I didn't lose much data. Just a few things I can download again.

After a couple of days, I decided to open it up since I can't afford data recovery services anyway, and there are videos on YouTube showing people fixing stuck actuator arms and even using the hard disk again.

My HDD did not have a stuck arm. It looked normal. So I powered it up, it tried to work, but gave up. I've found a video of another HDD behaving just like mine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lkz3DT33NQo

Does anyone here know what the problem could be?


YES, I know the disk is dead.

YES, I know that somebody is still going to say that the disk is dead anyway, because trying to DIY rescue HDDs is a deadly sin in Computerland and there is no vaccine against HDD Death Schadenfraude so that line is obligatory in every thread about malfunctioning HDDs.

YES, I know that opening a HDD outside of a clean room is risky. Thank you for sharing your super advanced Jedi knowledge.

I just want to know what to write down in the death certificate before I give my good friend a proper burial.

TIA

My guess, a bad board. The actuator arm going back and forth is the drive trying to initialize. I've seen, or rather heard, the repeated actuator arm going back and forth trying to initialize in an external drive where the power supply was out of spec and the voltage was a little too low. I assume your power is OK so I'm guessing the hard drive's controller board is defective causing the drive to be unable to initialize.

It also could be the signals the board is getting from the heads are not what it expects. How old is it? What make and model? If you look up that model, do you find a better or poorer than average failure rate reported? Sometimes a board can be transplanted from a working identical model to recover important data, something better done before exposing the innards to local atmosphere.

It's a three-year-old Seagate.

I don't have an identical model and I don't think that would work anyway because of the sector remapping chip.

In what I've seen I agree that most folks get an exact board to replace it. Usually only to get data off.

What is this sector deal?

Must be whether remapped sectors are cataloged on the platters somewhere, or in firmware on the board.

Yes, correct.

A failure of the heads or electronics is causing the controller to be unable to read the embedded servo information. Unable to sense the position, the controller concludes that the drive is a brick.
Ed