prag

Hi all

Im posting this in the hope that someone out there might be able to help as Im not having much luck in obtaining what I need.
I have a 500gb Sata Hard drive made by samsung with the rev a firmware on a F1_3D PCB. Basically the PCB drive chip on the PCB has blown and Im after another PCB to retrieve very important data off the hard drive. The drive is still under warrenty but Samsung have informed me that they will not retreive data or send me a new PCB as they do not do spare parts which is about as helpful as flinging dung.
If any of you good people have a drive for sale or a spare PCB for this revision and firmware please get in touch I would really appreciate it. Thanks

techquest

The problem is even though you get a replacement board it is not a guarantee it will work. This is because of the way drives & boards are manufactured and the fact that even though the drive might be the same model the variant of the board could be different and then the drive will not work.

The link may give you some more info on this, even though they are a data recovery org what they say is correct.

Samsung F1_3D Data Recovery - Datacent

Pimped

You can't use another board as it will not have the correct firmware even if you get it from a similar drive. drives are made in batches and a manufacturer usually churns out lots of batches each with different settings to read from the hidden sector before boot.

I had this problem before, you can contact the guy who repaired my drive and he will explain properly what I tried to explain here. I recommend him: How your hard drive works

WARNING: DO NOT USE ANOTHER PCB, YOU WILL MOST LIKELY OVERWRITE WHAT IS ON YOUR DRIVE IF THE PCB GIVES THE DRIVE PARAMETERS TO READ AND WRITE TO THE WRONG PARTS ON BOOT! DO NOT CONNECT IT EITHER, GET ADVICE FIRST

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prag

Thanks for the info guys its much appreciated

Pimped

No probs mate. The guy i recommended was the cheapest and most straightforward I came across.

let us know how you get on whichever path you take.

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prag

Just out of interest today I took off the PCB and cleaned all the contacts using surgical spirit. I noticed on the contacts that some of the gold was missing and that it looked a little burnt. After cleaning the contacts on the hard drive and then the PCB, I thought fuck it give it try and low and behold the fucker span up. I proceeded to load windows and it booted into windows and it showed up as E: on the system, when I went to see if the data was still intact the system lost the drive and it disappeared although it was still spinning.
I have a funny feeling that this old system I have it in could be the problem. The power supply is 750 watts but the system is an old P4 3.2 with a sata PCI card connected. Ive been having a lot of problems with the system recently because I think its on its last legs and to be honest its done me proud for 5 years now. Ive just recently bought a quad core dell with proper sata on the motherboard which Im waiting to be delivered early next week, Im gonna install the drive on that system after another clean of the contacts and see what happens hopefully I might get away with it and be able to extract the data I need and then the drive is away for RMA with samsung. I have a feeling that somewhere along the line the power supply has surged through the drive or something because the AGP graphics card keeps reporting when I reboot that the power is not connected. Anyway thanks again guys will let you know what happens when the new system arrives.

Pimped

Good luck, will be waiting on the god news mate

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torque

That's not strictly true but the get advice part certainly is. There's a guy I converse with on NG's and he repairs drives and recovers data for a living. He's always asking for anyone with a particular drive to contact him as he needs the PCB to swap over. I've sent him several over the last few years. He pays well and the method works just fine.

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