burlmart wrote:
The fellow that looked at our Samsung 320 Gn HD has been doing this stuff a long time. He said the Seagate device he used saw the data and it looked good. He reported that Seagate or one of his other apps (he named DOS as one) cleaned bad sectors. He mentioned boot and file firmware might be bad.
Among other things, I might see wher I can get a close vintage Samsung and swap firmware.
As long as you don't hear a clicking sound, or the drive appears to struggle when powered on, then keep it running. Don't turn it off. Get what data you can as soon as possible.
If the drive is making a constant clicking sound, then you may be damaging the platters to the point where data can never be recovered. In which case, power off.
Notwithstanding, my thoughts about attempting to swap out the PCB is to contact Samsung to see if it's possible. But I'm fairly confident, the answer will be no. As I don't believe that even data recovery companies do this for hardware failures. Instead, they remove the platters in a clean room, and install them in a similar working drive to attempt data recovery.
