Old hard drive Seagate ST351A/X error, blinking LED

[codepoet]

Hello,

I have an old Seagate hard drive that has been malfunctioning, and I'd like to get the data from it. It's a Seagate ST351A/X hard drive with 42mb of space. Specifications are here:
http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/seagate/ST351A-43MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html

The specific problem is that after turning on the machine, I hear a series of clicks, and then the front LED flashes 8 times. The computer's BIOS does not recognize the drive as attached. I have a video of it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ty5HYJhNsg

According to the specification page above, the 8 LED blinks means "Error uploading RAM". Does anyone know what that could mean and what if anything I could do about it? I'd appreciate any information or pointers.

Best
Mike

PS. Incidentally I bought another (working) hard drive of the same model just to compare how it should look. The Bios does recognize this drive correctly. The video of boot up is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQONGj0MnF4

 

[ddrueding]

Welcome to StorageForum.

If the BIOS won't detect the drive, you really are in trouble. Have you tried connecting it to another computer? As a secondary hard drive? Using an external enclosure perhaps? Worst-case, you can try swapping the circuit board from an identical drive, but I've only had a 10% success rate on that...

 

[codepoet]

ddrueding, thanks for your quick reply. I did actually try swapping the circuit board with that from the replacement drive, but this just resulted in the 8 LED flashes when the computer was turned on. I did try it in another machine as a secondary hard drive but to no avail.

Any other suggestions?

 

[Will Rickards]

Since you already tried the controller swap.
Have you tried the freezer trick?
This is usually the only thing that works in the case of clicking because of a head crash.

Once it is recognized you can use getdataback or similar.

 

[Will Rickards]

And depending on the value of the data, there is always professional data recovery companies.

 

[codepoet]

Will, thanks for responding. I've actually already tried the freezer trick once before, but there was no difference in the symptoms. Do you have any idea what "Error uploading RAM" could mean?

Another oddity I've noticed with the drive is the read/write assembly has a Torx screw underneath that actually rotates as the heads move around. It's visible in the video posted above:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ty5HYJhNsg

The screw seems to be adjustable, but I don't know what it actually adjusts - any suggestions?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Will Rickards]

My guess is that on a drive this old the firmware or some portion of it was written to the drive itself and then uploaded to RAM on the controller on boot. Or it is just trying to read the master boot record to RAM and failing. I don't see any RAM chips on that controller board though, or any controller chip. Maybe it is on the other side or not visible in the video.

I wouldn't adjust the screw. It is probably for removing the drive heads altogether.
You can open the drive and see if the platters are scratched or if the read head became dislodged from the arm and stuck to the platter. But it might not help you fix it. It might just satisfy your curiosity.
It may be possible to swap the platters to the other working drive.
But that also might just make it far worse if there if there is some alignment issue between the firmware and the platters.

Unless the data isn't very valuable I'd send it out to a professional at this point.
Every time you turn it on, it could be making the issue worse.
Or it could just be a bad master boot record.