Question: Hi. I have a Seagate 1TB internal hard disk which is dead for like over a month. Lost hope that I could recover some data. Until I noticed a peculiar thing. The hard drive spins perfectly as new without any strange noises. But of course, when it is connected to the SATA port of the motherboard, it isn’t detected. Strange thing is, using an external USB to SATA connector, if I try to connect the internal hard disk, then it gets detected sometimes. But it freezes the PC it is connected to. Like I cannot move my cursor even. The rest of the time, it goes undetected. So I am curious to know, where is actually the problem in Hard Disk? Is it the PCB? I hope there must be some Data recovery experts here to answer this!
Answer:When a hard drive power up, it load its firmware from a reserved System Area (SA) on the platters. If the drive has a weak head, then it struggles to read the SA. If it cannot load its firmware, then it doesn’t come ready and BIOS times out while waiting for it.
Seagate drives try to manage “pending” sectors during their POST. If this process takes too long, BIOS will time out. Some USB bridge firmware waits a little longer than BIOS. You might like to go into BIOS setup and wait for 10 minutes or so. Then exit without saving, or Ctrl-Alt-Del.
If the OS then sees the drive, it may hang when it hits a bad sector. If the drive is visible, try to obtain a SMART report with CrystalDiskInfo.