My Seagate ST3000DM001 failed me, it was no longer detected by the BIOS, when the PC starts, you can feel the disk spinning, and the head moving in the usual way, but after spending a minute waiting for it to be detected on the post screen, the computer simply ignores it (Does not detect it) and boots without it. meaning the operating system does not detect it !
Before i blame Seagate (I prefer western digital in general), this drives is more than 5 years old, was only used for storage, and never ran any software, but still, more than 5 years old.
2- Diagnosis
the most likely cause seems to be the PCB board as the BIOS does not detect the disk altogether, nonetheless, I have had excellent results with the freezer trick before (Even though the freezer trick is not something that is suitable for this type of malfunction, the freezer helps with mechanical issues often denoted by unhealthy sounds coming from the drive). so I froze it (Within a bag to avoid condensation), and tried it a day later, but absolutely nothing was different, no surprise there.
I also, for no reason whatsoever, removed the LID and took a look inside, no idea what i was expecting to find, but i did anyways, everything looks normal inside, and hopefully no significant dust went in there.
So i decided it was most likely the board, considered this my diagnosis, and will now act accordingly
3- Work
3.1 – Find a donor board
Before looking online for a board, I took a look at the drives I had at home, turned out I do not have two of the same drive, but i do have a 2TB ST2000DM001 which had the exact board (100687658 Rev: C) ! obviously, the BIOS on the board is different between the two boards, so that has to be flipped from one board to the other (Basic soldering skills required), but otherwise, the boards are identical between the 2TB and the 3TB, I might end up losing both in this operation, but getting the data out is certainly worth the try
3.2 – Copy the data from the donor 2TB drive to a third drive (western digital 2TB drive)
To begin with, I started by finding a similarly sized hard drive to copy the data that resides on the donor disks before i take its board out, luckily, I found a western digital green drive of identical size and sector size, namely a (Western Digital Green WD20EARX), this third disk is to make sure i don’t lose any data from the 2TB donor drive, so here is how it is done
After connecting both disks to a Linux PC, I identified which disk is which using the fdisk command
fdisk -l
Now that i know which one is the source and which the destination, I started the process of copying the data from the donor (2TB), to third disk (The western digital).
by moving the data on the 2TB drive (The healthy one) to a similarly sized drive , this copy procedure is the simplest task, with both connected to a Linux machine I used my favorite cloning tool (Nop, not DD, I switched to PV the moment i first tried it).
pv < /dev/sdd > /dev/sdf
Now, All i can do is wait for 4:30 hours (According to PV), then come back, take the drives out, and start the surgery. it is copying at 115MB/s probably because the WD is a green drive that uses SMR recording.
Now that it is done copying, I took out the boards (Few screws), de-soldered the bios chip as you can see in the video, and soldered the one from the 3TB board onto the donor board and the one from the 2TB board onto the presumably malfunctioning board
the disk BIOS chip is the one branded winbond and has 8 pins (usually the only chip with 8 pins).
out of curiosity, I connected the 2TB drive (Now With the bad board after the swap), and it worked ! this is defiantly bad news, the problem was not the board after all ! connecting the 3TB disk yielded the same old problem exactly !