I replaced the PCB on my Seagate St33000651AS. The hard drive powers on, but the computer is having trouble recognizing the drive.

iKokomo

Member
The PCB was bad (the HD never spun up) on my Seagate St33000651AS. Therefore, I bought a replacement board so I can recover the data on the drive.

When I swapped the board, the hard drive powers on, spins up, and starts clicking. Windows 10 makes the "something is connected" sound but the following happens:

1. My Computer does not show that anything is connected.

2. Disk Management, shows (Removable D: No Media)

3. Under Device Manager, Disk Drive shows (Generic MassStorageClass USB Device)

4. Also under Device Manager Portable Devices show (D:\)

I was wondering if there was a good way to get my data off of this Hard Drive?
 

voyagerfan99

Master of Turning Things Off and Back On Again
Staff member
Did you get the EXACT same PCB board? You can get one from a similar drive but unless it is an exact replacement it will not work.
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
If its clicking the drive is toast and will need to be sent in for the data to be professionally recovered.
 

iKokomo

Member
Sorry! I mean clicking as in a normal clicking. As in, it is working the way it should. This is not the click of death.
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
How did it fail? Was there some sort of other event where it quit working like a lightning strike?

It's possible it was either busy writing data or hadn't written all of its cache when it failed, which are easy vectors for file system corruption (like you're observing, device seen, but no data partition/volume). I'd make a clone of it then try to fsck the volume.

Cloning software or 'dd' in Linux can make a 1:1 binary mirror of the device.
 
Are you able to test the PCB that failed to make sure it was that and not the hard drive?
Having two of the same model fail on the same drive tells me that it's likely the drive and not the PCB
A google search of the St33000651AS shows that it has a rather high failure rate
Depending on how old the drive may be, it wouldn't surprise me if it just failed out of the blue
In that case data recovery may be best achieved by sending it out to the manufacturer or to a third party
 
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