I received this 500GB Seagate Momentus Thin drive that was making a beeping sound from a shop via our mail-in recovery service. The customer had brought their laptop in because it has stopped working, and the shop had removed the drive and found it was making a beeping noise instead of working normally.
Beeping sound coming from Seagate
The shop did try to get the drive to work by plugging it into a few different computers and seeing if their recovery software would recognize the drive. While this particular repair shop offers general computer repair and a little data recovery, they do not offer clean room data recovery. They suspected that this Seagate making a beeping sound likely would end up needing a clean room to complete the recovery project. This shop sends drives to us to complete affordable clean room recoveries for them, and we are pleased to help! We have a few programs available for shops that are looking to use us as their data recovery partner.
Heads stuck on platter issue
This ST500LT012 model drive is very thin and they seem to have a higher failure rate in my experience. The beeping sound on this drive is almost always caused by the heads being stuck on the platter and not allowing the motor to spin the platters. The beep is the sound the motor makes when it fails to spin properly.
Diagnosing the and moving heads
In this case, I opened the drive as soon as I received it to complete an inspection in the clean room under a microscope. The heads all looked intact and there was no visible damage to the platters, so I continued with a tool that lets me lift the heads off the platter and move them back to their proper spot in order to spin up the drive. After carefully inspecting the heads I could see there was no damage, so I turned it on and the heads worked properly!
Imaging the data
Imaging the drive went smoothly as there was no damage on the surface of the platter where the heads were stuck. Sometimes if there is a little bit of platter damage (like when the heads are damaged when they become stuck and they need to be replaced), it can be very difficult to get as much of the data as possible from that area of the drive. But in this case, with no damage, the imaging process went through easily. With a single imaging pass, I was able to recover 100% of the sectors.
Completing the beeping drive recovery
Once I had imaged the drive 100%, I ran the recovery software on the image and recovered 100% of the data on the drive. The shop had a happy customer as they were able to get all their important data back for far less than some of the other clean room data recovery labs charge. In a case like this where the issue is stuck heads, no internal parts had to be replaced, so the recovery fell under our Standard+ pricing.
Is your drive making a beeping sound?
If you would like help recovering the data from your drive, or if you are a shop that would like to send drives to me for recovery, please just contact me with any questions and we can go over the project and how to get started.
Thanks for reading!
Drive info: Seagate Momentus Thin 500GB, ST500LT012, PN: 1DG142-020, FW 1002YAM1, WWN: 5000C5006E6AFCFD, P/N: 691918-002, CT: 2DQTC01835PXEZ, DOM: 11/2013, DATE: 14212, SITE: WU, PRODUCT OF CHINA
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