Seagate ST3500320AS

[lstriker]

I am having some odd problems with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 GB ST3500320AS HDD that I am trying to fix for a friend of mine. Let me start the story from the beginning:

A friend of mine came to me asking me if I can fix a HDD that was failing, saying that he went to a store and they wanted to charge $350 for recovery. I told him I would give it a look over, but made no promises. He was using this internal HDD in some sort of external enclosure.

When I received the HDD from him, I placed it into my lower end machine to see what the problem was. When I connected it to my mobo and tried to power on, my PC would not power on at all. I figured the PCB on the HDD was fried. I then went to eBay and ordered an identical HDD that was having issues spinning up, but was guaranteed to have a working PCB.

When the replacement HDD arrived, I swapped the PCB and re-installed into my low end machine. The machine booted (I am running XP) and once at the desktop I saw the found new hardware balloon pop up right away. I did not close it out, but let it do its thing. When opening up my computer, I could not see the drive available to choose.

The drive can be seen from device manager, but I cannot actually access or read any files off of the drive. So I am assuming the PCB problem is fixed, but now I am wondering what the rest of the problem could be. I can see the HDD in the bios and the device manager in XP. I cannot boot from the HDD and as far as I know there is no OS installed on it anyway.

I have been able to read SATA II devices in the past. So I am not completely sure what the problem is here.

Some additional info to be known is that I flashed the firmware on the HDD to the newest firmware provided on Seagate's website. The mobo on the computer I am using is an MSI PM8m3-V.

Thanks for any help!

 

[dai]

check what is listed for it in disk management

 

[lstriker]

It doesn't show up in disk management, only in the device manager.

 

[dai]

if it is not in disk management then windows is not seeing it

is it seen in the bios

if your m/b only supports sata then you may have to put a jumper on the back of the drive to set it as sata instead of sata2

 

[lstriker]

So right now there is a jumper on the drive and it seems as if it is in the right spot (the jumper that limits it to 1.5Gb/s). I remember when I installed this computer, I did a fresh install of Windows XP and installed drivers on the fly. I do not remember installing a SATA controller driver, I should probably go back and look at that too. These are the jumper settings I am looking at. If I hold the drive with the PCB face up and the connectors towards me, the jumper is on the 2 left pins out of 4 pins total. It was like that the whole time I was testing it.

Also, it is seen just fine in the BIOS.

Edit: I take back the part about the SATA controller/mobo drivers. Like I said, I have used other SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) drives in this machine before and they worked just fine.

 

[dai]

run the m/board setup disk

set sata to be seen as ide in the bios

 

[Triple6]

Certain ST3500320AS has a firmware bug that causes the drive to stop functioning correctly, generally swapping the PCB will not get it out of that mode nor will a simple firmware update work. The bug only affects certain versions, what firmware was on the original drive? Swapping PCB's from a even a slightly different revision of the same ST3500320AS will generally not work at.

Here's the fix for the affected drives: https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/

 

[lstriker]

I was looking at these firmware bugs, but I am not so certain that I have either of the two bugs commonly listed for the 7200.11. It shows up in the BIOS, and the website you just listed said it wouldn't show up in the BIOS. I think I can use the Seagate S.M.A.R.T. utility to try and figure it out, but I am not sure if I fully trust the results based on what I have heard of it. When I get home later today I am going to play with drivers and the jumper on the drive and see if I can get it to read before I go and buy what I would need to force the firmware update as listed on that site.

Still kind of weird to me that it appears as new hardware, but doesn't show up as a drive anywhere except for the device manager in XP.

 

[Triple6]

In some cases the drive does show up in BIOS but with an incorrect, usually 0MB, size. Post the Firmware version of the original drive when you get home, It's printed on the top of the drive and maybe be something like SD15. If the firmware printed on the drive is not one of the affected ones then we will know for sure that it's a different problem. Although even if the firmware is one of the affected ones it could still be a different problem as well.

 

[lstriker]

I just got home and haven't had a chance to test anything further. The firmware is SD81 and doesn't seem to be one of the affected versions from what I can see. Where would it say if it is 0MB in size? It doesn't seem to say the size of the drive in the BIOS, unless I skipped over it? Also, where is the firmware installed to? I swapped the PCB from the one with SD81 firmware with another drive that had AD14 firmware. Not sure if it would make a difference? Thanks for all the help so far!

Edit: So I used a tool to look at the drive. The drive is running firmware SD1A and there is no size showing up for capacity.

 

[Triple6]

This article appears to list drives with SD81 and AD14 firmware as eligible for the firmware fix based on the serial number: http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/207951en

In my experience swapping PCB's between drives with different firmware series doesn't work as there tend to be other differences as well; with WDC drives you could have the same model number but completely different PCB's and connectors on the drive in different places.

 

[lstriker]

So if I were to follow that guide you posted and manually force a firmware update by pushing commands to it, do you think it may fix the problem? If not forcing the new firmware, do you think there is an archive of all the firmware and I can flash the same one it had before or there still would be differences between PCBs? I can't really find a list of archived firmware.

 

[Triple6]

You should only flash compatible firmware. Firmware for drives are generally provided if absolutely needed, there's generally no archive and most drives don't have publicly available firmware.

The link I posted was to get the drive working, not for forcing a firmware flash.

 

[lstriker]

Well the firmware that is on there now was listed as compatible, but the firmware update didn't seem to fix anything from when I first replaced the PCB and tested the drive and then after the firmware update with the new PCB. So I am really unsure of what my next step would be. This drive doesn't seem at all dead to me, so there must be some way of reviving this thing at least until I can pull the data off of it.

 

[Triple6]

Did you follow the instructions in the guide I provided? The guide involves soldering wires to the PCB, not just updating the firmware which will not fix the issue. The firmware is to prevent it from happening but not for restoring the drive to operation.