Seagate Circuit Board Replacement

[Clocker]

My friend had a Lacie external drive. It housed a ST3250823A 250GB Seagate drive. It appears the drive has gone belly-up. It spins up but the drive just clicks randomly.

I told him I'd check it out. I pulled the drive and attached it to my other external enclosure. It still does the same thing. I'm thinking about replacing the circuit board on the drive with one from the same model (ST3250823A). Has anyone here done something like that before with any measure of success?

My friend has a lot of valuable data on the drive and would like to try to get it back!

Thanks for any feedback you guys can give me!

C

 

[Fushigi]

IIRC Merc used to do that. As long as the logic board is from the exact same drive it should work. Ideally it would have the same firmware level but that's probably not mandatory.

In the future, beware that some drives, and Seagate is the first one offering this, will do on-drive encryption where the drive's circuit board will generate a key used to encrypt the drive. Depending on where the key is stored, swapping the logic board could obliterate the key, taking the data with it.

Right now that is offered on Momentus 5400 FDE drives and just recently was announced for 15K drives.

 

[ddrueding]

I've tried it three times, it has worked once. Depending on the value of the data, consider a professional recovery service (2 of 3 drive success with them so far).

 

[Clocker]

THanks. I ordered a replacement drive and will give the swap a try!

The drive contains baby pictures for a co-worker. I think they are very valuable to him. Can you recommend any data recovery services if the circuit board swap does not work?

C

 

[ddrueding]

I've used OnTrack, but they are not cheap.

 

[LunarMist]

drivesavers.com

 

[Clocker]

Circuit board swap didn't work. :-( Looks like this will end up costing him some cash if he has any chance...

 

[computersto]

I had a problem with my seagate HD, I found this webpage and I proved it hddzone.com

I′ve received the circuit board, and I′ve installed it and it worked perfectly. I′ve been able to recover all my files. The service is pretty good.