Beeping Seagate Rosewood Drive Recovery

This 2TB ST2000LM007 Seagate Rosewood drive was reported as making a beeping sound when plugged in. The beeping Seagate came to us from a client in El Dorado, KS, who is a professional photographer. The most common requests for important data are photos and work documents. In this case, the professional photos on the drive checked off both the photo and business document boxes! As a small business owner, I understand how important it is to get your business data back safe and sound (and sometimes quickly).

Beeping Seagate Recovery

While El Dorado isn’t too far away from our Kansas based recovery lab, the client opted to mail in the drive for recovery rather than make the drive. The carrier made quick work of delivering the drive and I started by opening the drive up to check the heads in my cleanroom environment. We get drives from all over the country through our mail-in program, so if you are too far away to drop off, don’t worry! We can help.

Heads stuck on platter

As I suspected when I heard the ST2000LM007 drive was making a beeping sound, the heads were stuck on the platter. I was correct as the heads were obviously stuck. These Beeping Seagate Rosewood series drives with 2 platters are notorious for having heads that get stuck and are damaged once they have been stuck. I moved the heads over to the ramp and took removed them from the drive assembly for a closer inspection with the microscope. They were indeed damaged, so I ordered a replacement head stack for this model and waited for it to arrive.

Swapping the heads

Once the donor head stack arrived, I swapped the bad heads with the new heads and got everything reassembled and ready for testing. The process went very smoothly and the drive got ready when connected to my PC-3000 recovery rig. The new head stack worked great and I had access to the data right away. I noticed head 0 on the donor stack was a little slower than the other head, but it still got all the sectors it was in charge of.

Imaging the drive

It took the imaging very slowly with the first pass set to skip any problematic areas, but all in all the imaging went very well with a total of 100% of the sectors being imaged. Once the imaging process was complete, I moved on to the software part of the data recovery process.

Because I was able to get 100% of the sectors from the drive, and the drive had stopped working due to stuck heads, all the folder structure was fully intact. There wasn’t really a chance in this type of drive failure for a lot of corruption to occur, but I still completed a full scan to be sure nothing was left behind and moved the data over to the good transfer drive.

All in all, the process took about 9 days to complete (including waiting for the donor drive to arrive). The client was very pleased the lab recovery was successful and they got all their important photos and work documents back, safe and sound. Because this drive required a head stack replacement, it was covered under our Lab Recovery tier. While it is our most expensive tier, it is still a lot more affordable than our competitors.

Start the recovery process for beeping ST2000LM007

If you need affordable data recovery, please give me a call to discuss your drive at (620) 615-6836 or fill out my free quote request form! I will get back to you ASAP about your recovery.

Drive Details: SEAGATE Mobile HDD 2TB, Part Number: 1R8174-568, WWN: 5000C500B5956074, ST2000LM007, FW: SBK2, Site: TK, DOM: 12APR2019

About Author

Aaron Hook

Aaron has been working in the Data Recovery industry for close to 10 years. While proficient in all aspects of data recovery, Aaron has spent the last few years in a clean room mastering the onerous skill of reconstructing and restoring the internal components of a hard drive. He is now one of the few data recovery technicians performing local, in-house clean room services in the Mid West region.

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